Maud Menten Institute / Mathematical and Statistical Biology Seminar: Maria Kuruvilla

Abstract: Industrial forest harvesting has altered the functioning of watersheds that support wild Pacific salmon. While the negative impact of forestry on salmon is well known among people whose lives are tied to the rivers that salmon spawn in, the population-level effects of forestry on salmon have not been quantified before.
 

In this seminar, I will talk about how we reconstructed annual time series of forest disturbances to 1,745 salmon watersheds in coastal BC dating back to 1883 and then developed multi-population spawner-recruit models and fit it in a hierarchical Bayesian framework to estimate the effect of forestry disturbance on salmon productivity. I will also talk about how I used simulations and profile likelihoods to overcome some of the estimation challenges that I faced.