Audit of the use of productivity trends in fisheries advice

In many cases ICES incorporates ecosystem trends and variability into the fishing opportunities advice. However, there is no system to document when and how this is done. This results in the inclusion and incorporation of ecosystem trends and variability being generally invisible to the network and the outside community. From 2019 to 2022, ACOM worked with the expert groups that feed into fishing opportunities advice to audit the use of ecosystem trends and variability into the fishing opportunities advice. A questionnaire was used as the main tool. In 2020, each stock assessment working group was asked to record the ways in which ecosystem trends and variability are accounted for in each stock assessment, forecast, mixed fishery or management plan evaluation. This included considerations for short lived and data limited stocks. This is the data set that resulted from the questionnaire.