Investigations of an Aboriginal Whaling Management Procedure using Adaptive Kalman Filtering

Abstract

The feasibilty of using Kalman Filter methods as the basis for an Aboriginal Whaling Management Procedure is explored in this paper. Adaptive Kalman Filters are used to obtain estimates of the stock size and posterior probability distributions for MSY rate (MSYR) and the pre-exploitation stock size K. A set of catch control laws is then used on these estimates of stock size, which together with the posterior distributions of the various combinations of MSYR and K, gives a cumulative distribution function for the strike limit. The eventual strike limit is then determined as a pre-specified percentile of this distribution. The procedure is tested on some Evaluation Trials set by the Standing Working Group on Aboriginal Whaling Management Procedures of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) Scientific Committee. The estimation of a bias factor was considered and results are presented.