Working Group on Methods of Fish Stock Assessment - Reports of 1993 and 1995 Meetings

Examples of problems raised in this context did not all appear to be related to life-span per se, as some of the species mentioned (e.g., sandeels, sardine) were harvested over age ranges extending beyond 5 years of age. Rather, the essential difficulty seems to relate to the provision of the short-term projections required for management purposes. This is frustrated, either because of the large contribution which the recruitment of the forthcoming year will make to the biomass of a genuinely short-lived species, or because of evaluation difficulties which arise for longer-lived species because of inadequacy or absence of certain data (such as recruit surveys).