Modelling of population dynamics of red king crab using Bayesian approach

The paper describes the principles of modeling population dynamics of king crab in the Barents Sea. Stock assessment is based on the realization of traditional methods for determining the productivity of a population. The assessment is based on the methods of stochastic cohort and surplus-production analysis of population parameters taking into account data collection methods, the quality and volume of the input information. Direct observations based on the results of research surveys and fishing have a significant amount of noise and often very vague. In addition, as the red king crab is an introduced species, the character of the growth of its population introduses significant uncertainty into the estimation of association between population and fishing parameters. Modeling population dynamics based on the Bayesian approach enables to successfully resolve the above issues. The integration of the data from various studies into a unified model based on Bayesian parameter estimation method provides a much more detailed description of the processes occurring in the population.