Report of the Benchmark Workshop on Redfish (WKRED 2012)

The WKRED 2012 Benchmark workshop met from 1–8 February 2012 at ICES Headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark. The meeting was chaired by Invited External Ex-pert Melissa Haltuch (USA) with ICES Coordinator Christoph Stransky (Germany). Doug Butterworth (South Africa), Tim Miller (USA) and Paul Spencer (USA) also participated in the meeting as a panel of Invited External Experts as well as 20 participants from nine countries. There were no stakeholder representatives in attendance. The objectives of the workshop were, for each stock under consideration:

1) to evaluate the appropriateness of data and methods to determine stock status;

2) to agree upon and document the preferred method for evaluating stock status and (where applicable) short-term forecasts and to update the associated Stock Annex as appropriate;

3) to evaluate the possible implications for biological reference points; and

4) to develop recommendations for future improvement of the assessment methodology and data collection.