The Value of Research Involved in Stock Assessment

Suggested Bibliographic Reference: Challenging New Frontiers in the Global Seafood Sector: Proceedings of the Eighteenth Biennial Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade, July 11-15, 2016. Compiled by Stefani J. Evers and Ann L. Shriver. International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade (IIFET), Corvallis, 2016.Proceedings of the Eighteenth Biennial Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade, held July 11-15, 2016 at Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Center (AECC), Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.Using stock assessments to inform management and decision makers about the impacts of fishing is increasing worldwide. Stock assessments are costly to conduct well, and there is often a data management lag in terms of when data used to inform stock assessment predictions are available for inclusion in the model. Therefore, increasing the frequency of conducting stock assessments and decreasing the data management lag need to be weighed against the benefits they may generate. In this paper, we use a management strategy evaluation approach that simulates the stock assessment process from a "true" population model that is sampled with error, thus generating a stock assessment with uncertainty. We apply our approach under the US National Standard 1 guidelines under which fishery management councils are required to implement a harvest control rule that determines an annual acceptable biological catch level that achieves an acceptable probability of overfishing. The simulation model is used to evaluate a range of data acquiring decisions to determine their performance in terms of economic welfare as measured by producer and consumer surplus while achieving the predefined management target of the probability of overfishing. In particular, we are interested in the impact of the data management lag on the stability of harvest over time and its impact on fleet dynamics. An empirical application is conducted for the Mid-Atlantic summer flounder for which the 2015 stock assessment update resulted in a considerable reduction in quotas. Such an instability in catch limits could have been mitigated by more frequent assessments