Trends in poaching for west coast rock lobster from modelling the “old” and the “new” databases simultaneously updated to 2018

Updated results are given for an approach which simultaneously models the “old” and the “new” databases as recommended by the Panel for the 2018 International Fisheries Stock Assessment Workshop, in which poaching data for 2018 is now included. These results are compared to those obtained previously. For cases where the “old” database is upweighted the 2018 poaching indices estimated for both the northern Super-areas (3-7) and for the southern Super-area 8+ show statistically significant decreases compared to 2017. A new smoothing method is put forward for converting the output poaching series obtained to the input series used in the assessments