Simon H. Fischer
Fisheries Assessment Scientist
For many fish stocks, data availability is limited, but these stocks nevertheless require scientific management advice. Simon’s work focuses on improving the management of data-limited fish stocks by developing and testing management strategies using the management strategy evaluation (MSE) approach to simulate the managed system.
Simon is an early career fisheries scientist at Cefas with a biology and fisheries science background and a PhD student at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London. Simon’s wider scientific interests include the assessment and management of marine fisheries resources.
He has been working on evaluating data-limited management strategies with simulations since 2014. This work includes the generation of operating models from life-history parameters which represent fish stocks and the fishery operating in a simulation, the exploration of management objectives against which the performance of management procedures can be evaluated, the analysis of the simulation outputs with statistical methods, the application of optimisation procedures to simulation frameworks in order to optimise management performance, and the use of high-performance computing (HPC) and massive parallelisation techniques.
Much of Simon’s work is closely aligned to the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), and he is a regular participant at ICES working group meetings and workshops.
Research Publications:
Selected Publications:
Fischer, S. H., De Oliveira, J. A. A., Mumford, J. D., and Kell, L. T. 2021. Using a genetic algorithm to optimize a data-limited catch rule. ICES Journal of Marine Science, https://doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsab018.
Fischer, S. H., De Oliveira, J. A. A., and Kell, L. T. 2020. Linking the performance of a data-limited empirical catch rule to life-history traits. ICES Journal of Marine Science, 77: 1914-1926, https://doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsaa054.
