Report of the Planning Group on Data Needs for Assessments and Advice (PGDATA)

In 2018, PGDATA started a second 3‐year programme with renewed terms of reference.After having achieved some practical and concrete objectives in its first 3‐yearprogramme, PGDATA entered a round of discussion with ICES on its future, and consideredsome of the weaknesses appeared in the first years. The new objectives assignedto PGDATA are to focus on the development of the Quality AssuranceFramework (QAF) for both fishery dependent and fishery independent data, createlinks between the different expert groups, promote for implementation the statisticalimprovements and good practices and make them easily accessible to the public.The renewed terms of reference are very ambitious, especially the development of aQAF, and in its 2018 session, PGDATA has initiated the reflection and set up the stagefor a full resolution of all its ToRs within the 3 year period.An ICES structured approach for a Quality Assurance Framework is proposed, takinginto account all ICES initiatives in the field of collection, processing and storage of fisheriesdependent and independent data, and the work done in other forum such asSTECF July 2017 (EWG‐17‐04). This framework, also compliant with the principles developedin the European Statistical Standard, will need to be presented to ICES, discussedand commented in order to come up with a more complete proposal in 2019.The accessibility to recommendations and good practices has been addressed througha restructuring of the ICES Quality assurance repository. The proposal makes use ofthe ICES website development and search facilities, and will need the implication ofseveral ICES working groups to come up with an agreed proposal in 2019. PGDATAis slightly more ambitious and would like to set the stage for a longer term achievementwith living documents classified by topics – this would include all recommendationsand good practices produced by the wealth of ICES technical workshops and workinggroups.The communication and feedback on data issues with assessment working group wasgiven a special focus, acknowledging the previous difficulties, and trying to learn fromthis experience. A large scan of exploratory figures produced by the assessment workinggroups in their reports has been undertaken, and have been classified by topics inannex of this document. The objective was to demonstrate the large creativity undergoingin this field, propose a catalogue of what is done for every end‐user, and set thestage for a forum like WGCATCH and WGISDAA to take over some ideas and developgeneric figures capturing the main information needed for the end users. It is the beliefof PGDATA that the exploratory figures used on the entry data for assessment modelsare the link between the data collection and processing world, the QAF and the assessmentand advice world.PGDATA also wished to propose an ICES ASC 2019 session on data collection andusing the same name as during the 2016 ASC to ensure a continuity of work: “When isenough, enough?” Methods for optimising, evaluating, and prioritising of marine datacollection. The idea is to prepare the edition of a special issue in a journal (IJMR) on thefindings.This PGDATA report is to be seen as an interim report preparing the elements for a fullreport addressing all the the terms of reference in 2020.