This project seeks to further our ecological understanding of the processes that drive boom-bust recruitment dynamics in west coast groundfishes. In these stocks, recruitment dynamics are characterized by recruitment that is typically low (bust years), punctuated by years of high recruitment (boom years). We hypothesize that these dynamics are driven by multiple processes acting together, where conditions across each of these processes must be good to lead to high recruitment, but failure in only one process can lead to overall recruitment failure. As such, we seek to develop an analytical framework that explores the environmental covariates that can explain these dynamics, relying on methods that can detect non-linear relationships between predictor variables and recruitment.
This website was created to share progress updates on this project. The different tabs are primarily dedicated to providing an overview of the data and comparing alternative methods for addressing our hypotheses.