The external mortality is all the mortality that is not due to fishing or
predation by predators included in the model. The external mortality could be
due to predation by predators that are not explicitly included in the model
(e.g. mammals or seabirds) or due to other causes like illness. It is a rate
with units 1/year.
The ext_mort argument allows you to specify an external mortality rate
that depends on species and body size. You can see an example of this in
the Examples section of the help page for setExtMort().
If the ext_mort argument is not supplied, then the external mortality is
taken from the species parameters as
$$\mu_{ext.i}(w) = z_{0.i} + z_{ext.i} w^{d_i}.$$
The value of the constant \(z_0\) for each species is taken from the z0
column of the species parameter data frame, if that column exists.
Otherwise it is calculated as
$$z_{0.i} = {\tt z0pre}_i\, w_{inf}^{\tt z0exp}.$$
Missing values of z_ext are set to 0 and missing values of d are set to
n - 1.
By default the power law is evaluated at the left bin edges \(w_j\)
(point sampling). If the bin_average entry of the second_order_w slot is
TRUE (see second_order_w()), then the \(z_{ext} w^d\) term is instead
replaced by its exact average over each bin \([w_j, w_{j+1}]\),
$$\frac{z_{ext}}{\Delta w_j}\int_{w_j}^{w_{j+1}} w^d\, dw
= z_{ext}\,\frac{w_{j+1}^{d+1} - w_j^{d+1}}{(d+1)\,\Delta w_j},$$
(with the limiting form \(z_{ext}\ln(w_{j+1}/w_j)/\Delta w_j\) when
\(d = -1\)). This is the consistent choice in the finite-volume scheme,
where the external mortality multiplies the bin-averaged abundance. The
bin-averaging is applied only to the auto-calculated power-law default; a
user-supplied ext_mort array is left untouched.