across multiple taxa to assess the status of Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea groundfish

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2004
• Subjects: Bering Sea; catch per unit effort; demersal community; frequency of occurrence; Gulf of Alaska; mean individual weight; randomization test; simulation envelope; Pacific; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.597.1066; http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/foci/publications/2005/muet0498.pdf

ICES Journal of Marine Science, 62: 344e352 (2005)Ecosystem-based approaches to fisheries management require researchers and managers to take into account effects of fishing on other components of the ecosystem, including non-commercial species. Currently, stock assessments in the Northeast Pacific are limited to the most important commercial species, little being known about the status of non-commercial species. Nevertheless, standardized bottom-trawl surveys conducted in the eastern Bering Sea (EBS) and Gulf of Alaska (GoA), although primarily designed to assess commercial species, provide valuable information on the abundance, distribution, and mean weight of numerous taxa. Using a novel statistical approach and survey data for the years 1993e2003, we examined trends in catch per unit effort (cpue), frequency of occurrence, and mean weight of individuals for each taxon. Time trends were computed as the slope of a linear regression of each indicator on year, and were summarized separately for the eastern and western GoA and for the EBS. Within each system, trends were further compared between commercial and non-commercial taxa. Simulations were used to obtain reference distributions for the expected distribution of slopes across many dependent populations. Observed distributions of trends were compared with simulated distributions, suggesting