Detection of Ecological Disturbances to Seabed Fauna through Change of Weight Distribution

Abstract

The effect of trawling on seabed fauna in the Northern Prawn Fishery experimental region of Australia is investigated through distributional changes in individual weights for each species. A stochastic growth model is employed to overcome a limited number of effective observations. One statistical challenge is to deal with non-identically distributed observations as only total weights and numbers of indi