Introduction

The Integrated Catch at Age (ICA) analysis was written by K. Patterson to provide an analytical stock assessment tool which allows a variety of model choices to be implemented conviniently (Patterson and Melvin, 1996). This Fortran program is extensively used in Europe to assess the status of pelagic stock.

In order to include ICA into the Fishery Library in R, a group of scientists (M. Kienzle, L. Kell) decided to replace the call to the NAG library with calls to a public domain library. They chose cernlib for the quality of software they provided, in particular for MINUIT, a set of functions for minimization and error analysis.