Report of the Benchmark Workshop on Pelagic Stocks (WKPELA 2014)

The WKPELA meeting was held in ICES HQ in Copenhagen from the 21–27 February 2014, to benchmark the assessments of herring in the Celtic Sea and mackerel in the Northeast Atlantic. The data compilation process and intercessional work began in October 2013. The assessment of both of these stocks was previously done using a statistical catch-at-age model ICA, which imposed structural assumptions on the data; the validity of some of these assumptions had been questioned in recent years.