If you’ve ever spent time exploring a part of the ocean protected from fishing you’ve probably been struck by the amazing abundance of marine life living there. These places, currently covering between 3-7% of the world’s oceans, are a form of Marine Protected Area (MPA). MPAs can be a powerful conservation tool, and there is a growing movement to expand MPAs to cover 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030. However, actually measuring the effect that MPAs have on fish populations can be very…

Stan is a programming language designed to make statistical modeling easier and faster, especially for Bayesian estimation problems. Stan can help you estimate complex models with large numbers of parameters, and can generally do it faster than alternatives like JAGS/BUGS