Sarah Bailey conducted her internship at the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) office in Narragansett, RI working as a statistical fisheries intern for Dr. Jon Hare. During this time Sarah analyzed the movement of a commercially viable fin-fish species, the Atlantic croaker, and was able to model their population distribution shift northward over the last 40 years using trawl data collected by NEFSC. With this information she the went on to better understand the mechanism behind this movement and found that it was linked to mean length, indicating that the larger fish within the population traveled the farthest poleward. Using this method of analysis, future research can be done on other commercial fish species in order to work towards a more fluid management regime, one that would be able to use the most up-to-date scientific information on fisheries populations to set more efficient regulations.
Sarah Bailey (MA, 2014)
