Biography

Dr Robyn Forrest is a research scientist at Fisheries and Oceans Canada (Groundfish), at the Pacific Biological Station, Nanaimo, BC. She is Canadian lead on the Joint US and Canadian Hake Technical Working Group for the assessment of Pacific hake (Merluccius productus) and scientific advisor to the Canadian commissioners of the International Pacific Halibut Commission. She is playing a key role in the continued development of assessment methods, risk assessment and communication of scientific advice for Pacific groundfish. She is a member of the Groundfish Integrated Advisory Board, the Canadian Halibut Strategic Working Group and is actively involved in the peer review process, both within DFO and internationally. She collaborates regularly with members of the Quantitative Modeling Group and will be working with Drs Steve Martell and Murdoch McAllister on management strategy evaluation projects for Pacific hake and small boat fleets in BC.

Previously, she worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Fisheries Centre, with Dr Murdoch McAllister in the development of a new model to account for simultaneous density dependent natural mortality and bycatch of age-0 red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico shrimp fishery (MS in prep). She also worked with Dr McAllister and others to develop a Bayesian hierarchical meta-analysis to estimate recruitment parameters and fisheries reference points for Pacific rockfishes (Forrest et al. 2010). Her PhD focused on estimation of productivity parameters for data-limited species and use of ecosystem models for evaluating trade-offs in multispecies fisheries (link to pdf).

She is particularly interested in relationships between life history, selectivity (of fishing gear), density dependence in recruitment and the management parameter, optimal harvest rate (Forrest et al. 2008). She explored these relationships in Australian deepwater dogsharks in the genus Centrophorus and has shown that optimal harvest rate is extremely low for these species. Importantly, this can be shown using only life history data and reasonable assumptions about gear selectivity (Forrest and Walters 2009). In February 2006, she spent a month visiting the Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (Hobart), where she collaborated with Drs Beth Fulton and Marie Savina on a project to compare the predictions of structurally-different ecosystem models (Ecosim and Atlantis, MS in prep). She maintains an active interest in using life history information to estimate sustainable harvest rates for data-limited species, particularly sharks (Dulvy and Forrest 2010) and in management strategy evaluation for evaluating performance of harvest control rules in the face of uncertainty.