Computational options for marine fisheries research and management

Marine fisheries research and management including its core domains like stock assessment and resource simulation and forecasting has of late been driven by the explosion in the computational power and designing and development of tailor-made software. Though the activities on the computational front have peaked in the last five years or so, the seeds were sown way back in eighties with the introduction of personal computing. Here it is relevant to record that digitization of fisheries related information and datasets were much older than these software developments. Although it is nearly impossible to prepare an exhaustive list of software and routines which are presently in use by researchers and planners in Marine Fisheries Management, it is possible to categorise the computational options on a perspective note. This paper would attempt doing that