Successes and failures of fisheries acoustics - an international, federal, and regional point of view

The workshop Fisheries Acoustics - Successes and Failures was held at the 1989 annual meeting of the American Fisheries Society, in Anchorage, Alaska, USA. Today this subject is relevant since many of the directors of national and state fisheries agencies in the United States hold opposing views on the value of acoustic measuring techniques for fisheries science. This workshop was intended to serve as a bridge for communicating between parties with different opinions, and to discover the basis for the controversy. International, national, and regional perspectives on the importance of acoustics and its limitations are presented. In addition, some new applications were presented that extended hydroacoustic techniques into areas of environmental impact, multispecies assemblages, and the management of fisheries in inland waters.