Fish Heaven: a Monte Carlo, spatially explicit single species fishery model for the testing of parameter estimation methods

Fish Heaven is a simple spatially explicit age structured fish model, containing the basic features of standard fish modeling with a number of optional extras. It was designed within an object oriented framework to allow for the possible extension in a number of directions. In particular it was designed with the view of testing the efficacy of different statistical sampling regimes given various plausible spatial structures of fish stock.
The model has a simple age and space structured population governed by the normal life history parameters and subject to both environmental stochasticity (if desired) as well as demographic stochasticity. It is a spatially explicit model in which fish will tend to distribute themselves according to their density and the underlying habitat quality variable. On top of this, fishing occurs. This includes a wide range of fishing options. The software has been constructed to allow for it to be extended to include more complex fishing management practices.
The manual for the software, Fish Heaven Version 1.0.0, forms the body of the paper. Although Version 1.0.0 of the software is complete it is still seen as a piece of software in development. Currently the software is designed to allow environmental simulations with fishing while capturing various statistics about the status of the system. Analysis of the output must be done with a separate piece of software, such as a statistical package, reading in the output files of Fish Heaven. A number of extensions are planned for the software and these are described in the appropriate sections of the manual as 'further improvements'.
The manual and software are both contained in the file FishHeav.zip. This is on the CD of Australian Antarctic Division software and additional copies are available from the Australian Antarctic Division. The manual contains colour pictures, although black and white copies of the manual still contain all of the necessary information. The copy of the manual in FishHeav.zip is a pdf file and includes all the coloured pictures.
The executable has been compiled for Windows NT but should run on any 32bit Windows operating system. It requires no additional libraries to run and takes up less that 1.4M of disk space. When running the size of the spatial grid is the limiting factor on memory requirements but is not terribly restrictive.