Report of the Benchmark Workshop on Roundfish and Pelagic Stocks (WKBENCH 2011)
WKBENCH 2011 is the ninth Benchmark Workshop held under the ACOM procedures for assessment review. The meeting was held at IPIMAR in Lisbon, Portugal from 24–31 January 2011. The meeting was chaired by Jim Berkson (USA) and the ICES Coordinator was Bjarte Bogstad (Norway). George Tserpes (Greece) and Jim Ianelli (USA) participated in the meeting as invited external experts. There were 19 participants in the meeting representing eleven nations. The main objective for the meeting was to review data inputs and assessment methods for five stocks (North Sea saithe, North Sea haddock, NE Arctic haddock, Icelandic summer‐spawning herring and southern horse mackerel) and to update Stock Annexes for these stocks (the reci‐pes for conducting assessments to be applied by working groups over the next three to five years). No stakeholders attended the meeting. The meeting started with a note that the day set aside for a data workshop was not necessary as the data avail‐able for use in the assessments had been compiled prior to the meeting. The meeting agreed on a set of priority issues for each stock (related to data quality, data analysis, and assessment methods). All participants reviewed each of the assessments with some short discussion groups convened to deal with specific issues. The full report of the meeting includes a set of generic issues identified during the workshop and asso‐ciated recommendations, followed by detailed stock‐specific reports and recommendations. A key output of the workshop was an updated Stock Annex for each stock.
The workshop faced some problems in fully addressing its terms of reference. These arose from the magnitude of items to review and the active development of model alternatives and datasets during the relatively short, eight day meeting. Considerable progress was made in this regard but this limited the ability to cover all aspects of every stock thoroughly.
History
Published under the auspices of the following ICES Steering Group or Committee
- ACOM