Marine sportfishing in southern California is a huge industry with annual revenues totaling many billions of dollars. However, the stocks of lingcod and six rockfish species have been declared overfished by the Pacific Fisheries Management Council. As part of a multifaceted fisheries management plan, marine conservation areas, covering many million square nautical miles, have been
mandated. To monitor the recovery of the rockfish stocks in these areas, scientists are faced with the following
challenges: 1) multiple species of rockfish exist in these areas; 2) the species reside near or on the bottom at depths of 80 to 300 m; and 3) they are low in numerical density. To meet these challenges, multifrequency
echosounders, multibeam sonar, and cameras mounted on remotely operated vehicles are frequently used (Reynolds et al., 2001). The accuracy and precision of these echosounder
results are largely dependent upon the accuracy of the species classification and target strength estimation
(MacLennan and Simmonds, 1992)
