Statistical multispecies models of multiarea marine ecosystems use a variety of data sources to estimate parameters using composite or weighted likelihood functions with associated weighting issues and questions on how to obtain variance estimates. R
egardless of the method used to obtain point estimates, a method is needed for variance estimation. A bootstrap technique is introduced for the evaluation of uncertainty in such models, taking into account inherent spatial and temporal correlations in the data sets thus avoiding many model--specification issues, which are commonly transferred as assumptions from a likelihood estimation procedure into Hessian--based variance estimation procedures. The technique is demonstrated on a real data set and used to look for estimation bias and the effects of different aggregation levels in population dynamics models.
