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.