A preliminary study on the estimation of the fishing mortality and the population abundance using weight-based virtual population analysis model (WVPA)

Virtual population analysis is one of classical methods in fishery stock estimation, which is used to analyze the history data, and to estimate the population abundance and the fishing mortality. This paper proposes weight-based VPA (WVPA), the result of Monte Carlo simulation analysis shows that even the white noises are high (30%), WVPA can also estimate the fishing mortality accurately the relative estimated errors REE=3.81%(long-lived population), and REE=2.75%(short-lived population). This paper applies WVPA and VPA to the red porgy fishery in Atlantic, and both results are almost similar. But giving it is easy to obtain the data of weight output, WVPA proposed in this paper has more advantages.