final_program_abstracts[1]

11 IMSC Session Program
Serial correlation in the water mass properties of the Gulf of
St. Lawrence
Tuesday - Poster Session 10
Denis Gilbert
Maurice-Lamontagne Institute, Dept. of Fisheries and Oceans, Mont-Joli, Canada,
The water masses of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, as well as most of the world ocean,
exhibit strong serial correlation in interannual time series of temperature, salinity,
dissolved oxygen and other properties. In spite of this, oceanographers and fisheries
scientists often ignore serial correlation in estimations of the mean or the trend of
univariate time series, thus overestimating the number of degrees of freedom and
underestimating the uncertainties for the test statistics. Another area of research
suffering from the neglect of serial correlation is fisheries oceanography. For
example, a large proportion of fish recruitment studies claim significant relationships
between a given environmental variable time series and the recruitment time series of
a particular species, completely ignoring the fact that one or perhaps both time series
are serially correlated to begin with. I will be reviewing some of the most popular
techniques for taking into account serial correlation in oceanography and fisheries
science.
Abstracts 121