Select Publications
- Branch, T.A., R. Watson, E.A. Fulton, S. Jennings, C.R. McGilliard, G.T. Pablico, D. Ricard, & S.R. Tracey. 2010. The trophic fingerprint of marine fisheries. Nature 468:431-435.
- Sethi, S.A., Branch, T.A., & Watson, R. 2010. Fishery development patterns are driven by profit but not trophic level. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A. 107: 12163-12167.
- Worm, B., Hilborn R., Baum, J.K., Branch, T.A., Collie, J.S., Costello, C., Fogarty, M.J., Fulton, E.A., Hutchings, J.A., Jennings, S., Jensen, O.P., Lotze, H.K., Mace, P.M., McClanahan, T.R., Minto, C., Palumbi, S.R., Parma, A.M., Ricard, D., Rosenberg, A.A., Watson, R. & Zeller, D. 2009. Rebuilding global fisheries. Science. 325: 578-585.
- Branch, T.A. 2009. How do individual transferable quotas affect marine ecosystems? Fish and Fisheries. 10: 39-57.
- Branch, T.A. and 41 coauthors. 2007. Past and present distribution, densities and movements of blue whales Balaenoptera musculus in the Southern Hemisphere and northern Indian Ocean. Mammal Review. 37: 116-175.
Prospective graduate students may contact me about my availability as a faculty advisor.
I am most interested in solving real-life biological problems through synthesis of multiple data types and through fitting mathematical models to data. These core interests have led me in a variety of directions. My most recent research focuses on global scale analysis of fisheries, including their current status and future directions, whether fishing down marine food webs is detectable in catches and in ecosystems, and which factors influence patterns in fishery development. I also have a long-standing interest in the human side of fisheries, including fishing behavior and fleet dynamics, and the impacts of individual transferable quotas (catch shares) on target stocks, discards, and the environment. Another major field of interest is the status and trends of large whale populations, particularly blue whales but also humpback and minke whales, interests which have led to papers on abundance estimation, changes in population size over time, and the separation of blue whale subspecies.