Report of the Working Group on Biology and Assessment of Deep-sea Fisheries Resources (WGDEEP), 4–11 April 2014 Copenhagen, Denmark

• Main Author: ICES
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: envir; geo; Iceland
• Online Access: https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00222/33352/31757.pdf; https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00222/33352/

WGDEEP met at ICES Headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark on 4–11 April 2014. The group was chaired by Pascal Lorance from France and Gudmundur Thordarson from Iceland. Terms of Reference of the Working Group are given in Section 2. 2014 was the first year WGDEEP gives advice according to a new advice schedule. In short it means that for half of the stocks advice is given in year y and the other half has advice in year y+1. The exception from this schedule is stocks from Va (Iceland) that will have advice annually. Available time-series for international landings and discards, fishing effort, survey indices and biological information were updated and for all stocks and are presented in Sections 4 to 14 of the report. For some fisheries, significant discrepancies were found between official landings data supplied to ICES and scientific estimates of landings. In order to maintain the consistency of time-series (which previously used only scientific estimates), some landings have been included in the data tables as “unallocated landing” (see Section 2.2). The EG provided generic commentary on the application of the HCR to deep-water stocks in the ICES area and specific comments on the application of the HCR in the 2012 advisory process with respect to specific stocks assessed by WGDEEP. In particular, it was found that, when catches decrease year on year it may not be sensible to use a three year average as the basis in the 3.2 rule or other DLS rules that use catches. This may result in higher advice, even with the 20% buffer and the additional 20% cap, than the catches in the terminal year. To further develop methods to provide quantitative advice consistent with the MSY framework, WGDEEP has applied a new approach to Productivity Susceptibility Analysis (PSA) using orange roughy stocks to the west of the British Isles as a case study (Chapter 15). Following WKDEEP 2014, a particular HCR was also adopted for black scabbardfish; assessed for the first time as a unique stock widespread in the NE Atlantic, which ...