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

The Planning Group on Data Needs for Assessments and Advice (PGDATA), meeting was hosted in Nantes in France from the 7–10 of February 2017. Eighteen experts from eleven countries participated to the meeting chaired by Joel Vigneau, France, and Ma-rie Storr-Paulsen, Denmark.The main output of the meeting was an evaluation of the 2017 ICES EG data call, where the PROXY data call on length data from data limited stocks was included. The audit included redefinition of some variables, mainly concerning the landing obligation and clarification of the proposed text. The process was thought to be very useful as the data provider had not earlier been involved in the process of committing on the data call but merely been trying to comply on their own with the data call text. It was however thought that the involvement of PGDATA earlier in the process could improve the process, as the data call deadline prevented the needed review thoroughness. Further, the meting focused on finalizing the ToRs for the workshop on BIOPTIM and establish the work process and preparation for the workshop. The BIOPTIM aims to look at ways in which biological parameters obtained from sampling commercial catches can be op-timized so that the time and money spent on sampling can be effectively justified in terms of providing quality information to end-users. The aim is to develop an R tool-box which can be used by national labs to quantify the effects of different sampling intensities and sampling designs, and support discussions on the advantages and dis-advantages of different sampling strategies in terms of time and cost savings. As part of the improvement of the data quality on biological parameters (mainly otoliths) PGDATA and WGBIOP developed a roadmap for implementing the SmartDots soft-ware developed by ILVO to replace WebGR as the regional/European system for oto-lith age reading and possible maturity classification. Further development in spring 2017 will make it possible for SmartDots to be integrated in a web platform provided by ICES. PGDATA 2017 also finalised the guidelines for the data compilation work-shops taking into account the feedback from the 2016 benchmark data evaluation meet-ing for the Irish Sea (WKIRISH2) and Kattegat cod (WKBALT), and streamlining the benchmark process even further by updating the issue list template that are normally populated by the assessment working groups. In order to increase the data quality and communication between the expert groups and data providers, PGDATA suggested a further development and maintenance of the Data Quality Assurance Repository. The idea is to structure in the Repository all the work done, within the different technical workshops, on data quality and best practices, thereby avoid that scientist from na-tional institutes, or from other working groups, having to read through all the reports in order to find the relevant guidelines.