National Stock Assessment Workshops

NOAA Fisheries held the 9th National Stock Assessment Workshop“Quantifying Scientific Advice for Ecosystem-Based Fishery Management” in San Francisco on April 18-20, 2006. Eighty-six scientists from the NOAA Fisheries’ Science Centers, the Office of Science & Technology, and several universities met to discuss methods for assessing the status of fish stocks and for using these results to provide scientific guidance for fishery management. These internal workshops have been held every 1-3 years since 1991 to increase the standardization of NOAA’s fishery assessment methods nationally and to advance the state-of-the-science. The sessions of the 9th meeting covered the four major aspects of stock assessment investigations: (1) statistical analysis of survey and fishery data; (2) advancements in the models used to synthesize the data into stock status information; (3) improvements in converting model results into management evaluations; and (4) expansion of models to include ecosystem and environmental information. A joint session with the Economics and Social Science Workshop was also held addressing bioeconomics during the San Francisco meeting.