Dr Jeremy Prince – Fisheries Assessment and Management
Professor Carl Walters of the University of British Columbia, refereeing Dr Jeremy 
Prince’s doctoral thesis in 1990, wrote: “Over some 20 years as a university faculty member, I have read about 60 doctoral dissertations. I have simply one conclusion: this is one of the best theses that I have seen, or hope to see, in the field of fisheries ecology. I hope that he will hurry to publish it as a book and I assure you that this book will have a major impact on fisheries thinking around the world.”
Growing up a single minded free-dive spearfishing champion in Western Australia naturally led to a passionate interest in naturally dynamic systems and how humans must find balance in them, so it is logical that Dr Prince has found opportunities in the field of sustainable fisheries.
Called ‘the fisher whisperer’ by Noah Idechong of Palau, Dr Prince speaks the language of fishing communities, and with this has worked on the interface between government and fishing communities since the early 1980s. Technically combining resource assessment modeler and fisher knowledge, his original Australian experience extends across shallow temperate fisheries for rock lobster, shrimp, abalone, sea urchins and sharks, down to deepwater fin-fish including orange roughy and gemfish, and north into the tropical pearl culture and tuna fisheries and traditional hunting for dugong in northern Australia.
Dr Prince is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Murdoch University in Western Australia.
Passionately interested in the conundrum posed by small-scale data-poor fisheries since his doctoral studies on abalone in the 1980s, which lay the basis for his international reputation, Dr Prince’s 1989 thesis provided one of the first detailed showcases of why established broad-scale ‘big-science’ methodologies fail on patchy small-scale resources like abalone. In North and South America, and Australia, the thesis went on to be used as a teaching text.
Today the issue of assessing and managing data-poor and spatially complex fisheries has been recognized as a global challenge for food security and coastal bio-diversity, and it has been estimated that only 10% of the world’s exploited fish species can be assessed with the established methodologies.
This central issue has been that until now there has been no scientific method for assessing community scaled stocks and providing scientific management advice cost-effective enough to be applied by communities.