Report of the Ad hoc Group on Deep-sea Survey (AGDSS)

Under the current MoU between ICES and the EC, ICES is required to provide fisher-ies management advice for deep-water fish stocks in relation to the MSY framework. ICES, as well as EU project DeepFishMan, have made considerable progress in as-sessing deep-water stocks however progress has frequently been hampered by the lack of appropriate fisheries independent dataseries leaving assessments heavily de-pendent on abundance indices derived from commercial landings data. Problems related to the use of commercial cpue series are well known but may be particularly acute in the case of deep-water fisheries because of the large spatial extent of stocks relative to fishing areas, the effects of depth on catch rates, and potential for sequen-tial depletion of local aggregations. Additionally, the introduction of very low or zero TACs for a number of stocks has led to the truncation of some commercial cpue series and reduction in the quality of others, further increasing the need for fisheries inde-pendent data in order to monitor stock recovery.