Forecasting Fish Stock Recruitment and Planning Optimal Harvesting Strategies by Using Neural Network

Recruitment prediction is a key element for management decisions in many fisheries. A new approach using neural network is developed as a tool to produce a formula for forecasting fish stock recruitment. In order to deal with the local minimum problem in training neural network with back-propagation algorithm and to enhance forecasting precision, neural network’s weights are adjusted by optimization algorithm. It is demonstrated that a well trained artificial neural network reveals an extremely fast convergence and a high degree of accuracy in the prediction of fish stock recruitment.