Report of the Workshop on Guidelines for Management Strategy Evaluations (WKGMSE)

The Workshop on Guidelines for Management Strategy Evaluations (WKGMSE) met 21-23 January in Copenhagen, Denmark. The meeting was chaired by Dankert Skagen and John Simmonds, with 19 participants from 10 nations.
The purpose of the meeting was to review and bring up to date the methodologies and technical specifications that should be incorporated in MSE. The workshop also considered appropriate risk definitions for MSE, taking into account practices in ICES and elsewhere and developed an updated set of guidelines for MSE evaluations in ICES.
In order to review the methodologies and standards used in the past a summary template was prepared and circulated to participants. Eighteen MSEs were summarised using the template and reviewed at the workshop, these template tables are annexed to the report. Based on these reviews and the subsequent discussion the guidelines from SGMAS 2008 were revised at the workshop. A report evaluating the historic use of precautionary criteria used by ICES was prepared in advance of the meeting. This report is annexed to the report. The different precautionary criteria used for different MSEs were compared and following this the workshop recommended revised criteria that are consistent with the ICES precautionary approach for stocks not subject to MSEs based on Blim and the 95% biomass buffer Bpa. The workshop also included consideration of short lived species where the stocks may have greater than 5% probability of being below Blim with zero fishery.
The report describes first the review of past MSE work in Section 3 and then consideration of ICES standards for precautionary approach in Section 4. Based on these considerations revised guidelines for modelling and brief standards for reporting are provided, including a revised version of the reporting template to summarise the work.
The main results of the workshop are the revised guidelines and recommendations for revision of ICES precautionary criteria for management plans.