Report of the Working Group on Fish Ecology (WGFE)

•Compatibility between IUCN decline criteria and ICES reference points was re‐examined and it was concluded that for the most part they are compatible, i.e. it is unlikely that threatened or endangered status would be assigned to a species whose biomass was larger than the safe biological limits.•A first attempt to model recovery of the North Sea EcoQO was made with an ecosystem model suggesting that recovery on the time frame of a decade was realistic.•Methods for comparing maps of species distributions were explicated and a new method for multidimensional map comparison was proposed. Methods like this could be used as a standard for common TORs assigned to several working groups (e.g. OSPAR climate request) in order to produce compatible output for a unified ICES response.