UW Aquatic & Fishery Sciences Quantitative Seminar

Ian Taylor

NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center

Pacific Hake Management Strategy Evaluation: Not Just for Managers

Abstract

Pacific Hake is a commercially valuable stock that is managed under a bilateral agreement between the United States and Canada and has an annual stock assessment conducted by a 5-person international committee. A Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE) was recently initiated as a condition of certification of the hake fishery by the Marine Stewardship Council. Although the analyses to date are not particularly complex, they have proven useful for fostering discussions among managers about harvest control rules and providing some guidance to the fishery agencies about survey frequency. The assessment team has also found the MSE results useful for choosing among candidate assessment models. The talk will include an overview of the most recent hake stock assessment, the MSE work to date, and a discussion of some potential future directions that MSE work could go.