On the stock estimation for some fishery systems

In this work we address the stock estimation problem for two fishery models. We show that a tool from nonlinear control theory called “observer” can be helpful to deal with the resource stock estimation in the field of renewable resource management. It is often difficult or expensive to measure all the state variables characterising the evolution of a given population system, therefore the question arises whether from the observation of certain indicators of the considered system, the whole state of the population system can be recovered or at least estimated. The goal of this paper is to show how some techniques of control theory can be applied for the approximate estimation of the unmeasurable state variables using only the observed data together with the dynamical model describing the evolution of the system. More precisely we shall consider two fishery models and we shall show how to built for each model an auxiliary dynamical system (the observer) that uses the available data (the total of caught fish) and which produces a dynamical estimation of the unmeasurable stock state x(t). Moreover the convergence speed of towards x(t) can be chosen.