CAPAM

In 2012, Mark co-founded the Center for the Advancement of Population Assessment Methodology (CAPAM; http://capamresearch.org/) with Paul Crone of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries (NMFS) Southwest Fisheries Science Center and Brice Semmens of Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO). The goal of CAPAM is to improve quantitative methods used in fisheries stock assessment and facilitate the development of a Good Practices Guide (GPG) to stock assessment modelling. The main activities of CAPAM revolve around the workshop series and associated special issues in the journal Fisheries Research. Mark has co-organized all the CAPAM workshops and chaired most of them. He has also been a guest editor for all the special issues. The workshops have covered several topics including: diagnostics, natural mortality, next generation stock assessment models, spatial stock assessment models; spatio-temporal modelling, recruitment, data weighting, growth, and selectivity. CAPAM has built an excellent reputation, which has been recognized through being awarded the American Fisheries Society's (AFS) William E. Ricker Resource Conservation Award in 2018 and the American Institute of Fishery Research Biologists’ (AIFRB) Outstanding Group Achievement Award in 2017.