It was a gamble, or as Dr. Nathan Vaughan said in his Australian English, “a big punt,” when he started his own research company – Vaughan Analytics. Vaughan came to the United States from Australia in 2007 to complete a PhD at the University of Miami (UM). After he earned his degree, he stayed at UM as a postdoctoral researcher gaining additional experience and connections with NOAA’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center. His background in fisheries stock assessments and work with NOAA gave him the confidence to apply and receive funding from the NOAA RESTORE Science Program in 2021 and 2023 to develop next-generation fisheries forecasting methods.

Pathway to the Private Sector

While he works in the private sector now, Vaughan started off his research career on a traditional academic path. During his postdoctoral position, he became more familiar with the tradeoffs that accompany being part of a large institution and wondered if there was an alternative research model that would allow him to be more nimble and maximize his creativity. He realized that he might be better able to respond to the needs of his partners and have more freedom if he set out on his own. When the timing was right, he jumped at the chance for greater professional independence.

“I figured out how to set up a business and submit applications … and set myself up on my own to sign for contracts,” he said. 

Doing the paperwork to set up his own business paid off. Vaughan is currently the lead investigator on a $1.2 million grant from the NOAA RESTORE Science Program to build updated fishery forecasting capacity for stocks in the Gulf of Mexico in partnership with NOAA’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center with the goal of improving the sustainability of fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico. This work is a continuation of an $81,047 planning grant he received from the Science Program in 2021. While private companies have collaborated on past projects, Vaughan Analytics was the first to lead one. 

Building Stock Assessments 

One way in which fishery stocks are managed is by establishing catch limits. The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC) works to recommend catch limits to ensure stocks are sustainably fished. This is where Vaughan enters the picture. Estimating catch limits requires synthesizing a wide variety of data and building computer models to understand how fish populations might respond to future events such as a red tide or increasing ocean temperatures. 

Building these models is not easy. While there is some data on the number of fish caught and their size composition, many more variables must be set or estimated with limited information. Some of the most important model unknowns include the selectivity patterns of fishing fleets and the abundance of juvenile fish recruited to the fishery each year. These issues are further compounded when developing the projections needed to calculate sustainable fishing rates and catch limits.

“There’s a lot that’s assumed when you’re doing a stock assessment,” Vaughan said. “We need all sorts of things. We need information on what size fish are being caught by different types of gear in different fleets, changes in fish growth or mortality through time—lots of things need to get built into the model,” he said.

“In stock assessment work, we usually have an idea about what questions we want to answer, we just need to find the best way to answer them,” Vaughan said. “When assessment scientists need a new tool to facilitate getting an answer—that is where I can help,” he said. One tool produced through Vaughan’s collaboration with the Science Center enables catch allocations between fleets to be incorporated into population projections. By developing these types of tools, Vaughan is empowering stock assessment scientists to examine the effect of multiple variables on fish populations, and therefore more accurately set catch limits to support sustainable Gulf fisheries.

However, modeling large systems, like the Gulf of Mexico, can be challenging.  Accounting for the dynamics among stocks, fleets, natural processes, and other factors in the Gulf can lead to highly complex models. It’s important to strike a balance between including enough important variables for the model to be effective, without adding so many that the model becomes unwieldy and fails to predict future fishery outcomes. Vaughan and his collaborators are developing methods to inform this decision and help guide regional management.

One challenge stock assessment scientists face is examining the intricacies of fishing limits and discards in the stock assessment model. Currently, the model assumption is that lowering the catch limit will also lower discards. 

“Obviously if you close one fishery, in order to stop people from catching a particular type of fish, people will still be out there catching fish and just throwing that one type back in the water.  So your discards may actually go up rather than go down,” Vaughan said. “So we’re working to build in the capacity to model this scenario.”

Building in capacity is an area where Vaughan’s work intersects with other NOAA RESTORE Science Program projects. For example, Vaughan enabled the integration of data from Dr. Dave Chagaris’s work on the impact of red tides on fish mortality into the Science Center’s catch limit projections for gag grouper. By developing decision-support tools that integrate real-world scenarios, Vaughan gives stock assessment scientists a more complete picture of the fishery.

Meeting Management Needs

The frequently changing demands of fisheries management mean that Vaughan’s work often looks different from a traditional research project. Dr. Skyler Sagarese works at the NOAA Southeast Fisheries Science Center as a research ecologist, and is one of the natural resource managers on the project. She praised Vaughan for his flexibility in solving the many problems associated with stock assessments, sometimes in the wee hours of the morning. 

“We often get requests from fishery managers that come up all of a sudden, it’s like a fire,” she said. “There’s a lot of those types of smaller projects that we get done that at the beginning of the project you never even thought you’d be doing. Nathan is really helpful in those high pressure, short turnaround times.”

Sagarese specifically noted his work helping NOAA’s Caribbean fisheries scientists build stock assessment capacity.

“[The Caribbean is] very new to the integrated stock assessments that we conduct regularly in the Gulf. With Nathan’s help, they were able to build a couple of different models and bring their model ensemble to managers. He’s very flexible at figuring out what’s the biggest fire and where he can help right now, which ultimately [affects] what decisions managers are making,” she said. 

Critical Communication

Communicating what goes into the stock assessment models and how they work is an important step in getting people to use the models and contribute to their development. The range of people that have to understand Vaughan’s work is fairly diverse. For instance, he periodically presents results to the Gulf of Mexico SSC, which is composed of researchers and state fish and wildlife officials. Once the SSC agrees on a recommendation, it goes to the full council, which includes representatives from the fishing industry. 

“I think if we can explain the dynamics, then hopefully that’ll help fishermen bring their opinion and knowledge to the table,” he said. “The more they understand how these models work, hopefully the more they can engage and see that we’re just trying to get as many fish for them as we can in a sustainable way.”