Welcome to ALSCL Discussions!

[Linbojun99]

👋 Welcome to the ALSCL community!

ALSCL is an R package for fitting age-based and length-based statistical catch-at-length models to fishery-independent survey data, built on TMB.

Zhang, F. & Cadigan, N. G. (2022). An age- and length-structured statistical catch-at-length model for hard-to-age fisheries stocks. Fish and Fisheries, 23, 1121–1135. doi:10.1111/faf.12673

We're using Discussions as the main place for the ALSCL community to connect. Feel free to:

• Ask questions — model setup, parameter tuning, convergence issues, interpretation of results
• Show your work — share plots, stock assessment results, or interesting findings using ALSCL
• Suggest features — new plot types, additional species presets, model extensions
• Report issues — unexpected behavior, unclear documentation, installation problems (or use the Issue tracker)
• Discuss methodology — ACL vs ALSCL trade-offs, growth transition matrix design, F structure choices

🚀 Getting started

devtools::install_github("Linbojun99/ALSCL")

Check out the README for a quick start guide with worked examples, and the User Guide vignette for a comprehensive bilingual (English/Chinese) walkthrough.

💡 Common topics

Topic	Where to post
How do I fix convergence / boundary issues?	Q&A
ACL vs ALSCL — which should I use for my species?	General
Feature request or new species preset	Ideas
Bug report	Issues

We look forward to hearing from you — whether you're a fisheries scientist, a student learning stock assessment, or an R developer interested in TMB-based models. Welcome aboard! 🐟