Additional details and supporting information can be found in the Appendix of the GARM-III

• Main Authors: Loretta O’brien, Jay Burnett, Michele Traver
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Total commercial landings of Gulf of Maine-Georges Bank (GM-GB) American plaice; Garm; Northwest Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.214.1003; http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/nefsc/publications/crd/crd0815/garm3h.pdf

American plaice is distributed along the Northwest Atlantic continental shelf from southern Labrador to Rhode Island in relatively deep waters (Collette and Klein-MacPhee 2002). Off the U.S. coast, American plaice are managed as a single stock in the Gulf of Maine-Georges Bank region (Figure H1) where the greatest commercial concentrations exist between 90 and 182 m (50 and 100 fathoms). This stock was last assessed and peer reviewed in August 2005 at the GARM-II meeting (O’Brien et al. 2005). The assessment was conducted using VPA with total catch including commercial landings, large mesh discards, and shrimp trawl discards for ages 1-9+. For terminal year 2004, total commercial landings were 1,711 mt and fully recruited F (ages 5-8, unweighted average) was estimated to be 0.15, the lowest F in the time series (1980-2004). Spawning stock biomass was 14,149 mt in 2004, a 10 % decrease from 2003. The 2003 (54.8 million age 1 fish) and 2004 (66.7 million age 1 fish) year classes were well above the long term average (33.1 million age 1 fish). The spring and autumn research survey indices of abundance indicated a decreasing trend during 2000-2005. Recruitment indices of age 1 fish from NEFSC autumn