The MARAM Group is concerned with quantitative studies related to scientific recommendations for conservation measures governing the utilisation of South African and some other of the world's renewable marine resources. Over recent years, its work has been funded primarily through contract with the Cape Town-based South African Marine and Coastal Management Division and the Namibian Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources (together with the Namibian hake and deepwater industries) though funds have also been forthcoming from the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) sea and coast programmes, the South African Department of Environmental Affairs (for Antarctic related studies), the US East Coast Tuna Association, the combined tuna industries of Australia, Japan and New Zealand and the International Whaling Commission.

Research links

In addition to maintaining close ties with researchers at the South African Marine and Coastal Management Reserved Division, the Group is at present also involved in collaborative research with scientists at the (CSIRO) Marine Laboratories (Australia), the National Research Institute for Far Seas Fisheries (Japan), the National MIRC (NatMIRC) (Namibia), the Fisheries Research Institute at the University of Washington (USA) and the Wildlife Population Assessment Research Group at St Andrews University (UK).

Research focus

The focus of the Group's work is the assessment and management of renewable marine resources. 'Assessment' relates to the evaluation of the present size (in particular in relation to pre-exploitation levels) and the productivity of a resource, while 'management' pertains to the translation of this information into scientific recommendations on appropriate limitations for harvest levels. Most of the methods used at present to lead to such recommendations for South Africa's major commercial fisheries have been developed by the Group. In particular, the adoption of automated feedback-control management procedures has been successfully promoted for some of these fisheries (this is an area where South Africa is regarded as a world leader). At the technical level, particular areas of interest at the moment are the comparative merits of assessment methods which incorporate and those which ignore information about the age structure of the animals harvested, and the use of Bayesian estimation methods to take account of auxiliary information (e.g. comparative data from stocks of similar species elsewhere in the world) in assessments.

International involvement

Group members also participate in the Scientific Committees of a number of international fishery commissions:

• the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (as South African representatives),
• the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (as representatives of the United States of America),
• the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna (as industry consultants), and
• the International Whaling Commission and the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (as specialist invited participants).

The Group's contributions usually take the form of reports to local or international scientific committees charged with formulating conservation measure recommendations for particular resources. Many of these reports are subsequently recast and published as scientific papers.