Ray Beverton

Achievements Much of the foundations of quantitative fisheries science were laid out in On the Dynamics of Exploited Fish Populations The book has a new reprint from 2004, with a foreword by Sidney Holt.

Beverton was also one of the first to acknowledge the variation of life histories that exists in fish, and the importance of this in fisheries management. This was the topic of the symposium Building on Beverton's legacy: Life history variation and fisheries management, organised in 2003 during the 133rd annual meeting of the American Fisheries Society. The legacy of the 1957 Beverton and Holt treatise is commemorated in the volume Advances in Fisheries Science. 50 years on from Beverton and Holt. The volume includes a foreword by Sidney Holt.

Beverton was the editor of Journal du Conseil, now ICES Journal of Marine Science, from 1983 to 1991. Among many other posts, he was the Deputy Director of the Fisheries Laboratory, Lowestoft. Outside fisheries science, Beverton is best known for the Beverton–Holt model. In population ecology the model is used as a stand-alone discrete time population model or as a model of density dependence in larger population models. Originally the model had a more specific usage; it was devised to describe the dependence of recruitment on spawning stock biomass.

Beverton Medal

The Fisheries Society of the British Isles awards each year the Beverton Medal "to a distinguished scientist for a lifelong contribution to all aspects of the study of fish biology and/or fisheries science, with a focus on ground-breaking research." The history of the medal goes back to 1995 when the society decided to award a medal to an individual who had contributed significantly to fisheries biology. Ray Beverton was the first recipient, but he died soon afterwards. The medal was then named in his honour.

Awards received

Honorary DSc from the University of Wales (1989).