Western Pacific Stock Assessment Review of the 2017 Benchmark Stock Assessment for the Main Hawaiian Islands Deep 7 Bottomfish Complex

Scientists from the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center conducted a benchmark stock assessment of the main Hawaiian Islands Deep 7 bottomfish complex. This benchmark assessment incorporated new data in the form of fishery-independent biomass estimates, and also followed data filtering recommendations from a series of five community workshops that involved fishermen, managers, and scientists on best practices for filtering bottomfish commercial catch and effort data from State of Hawaii commercial catch reports. Because of these workshops, PIFSC scientists are now able to better link individual fishermen's catch reports further back in time and these connections are newly applied in this benchmark stock assessment.

This assessment used commercial data for the years 1948-2015, and assessed Deep 7 bottomfish by building on the modeling framework from the previous three assessments, but with improved data and data filtering as previously described, along with improvements to catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) standardization, and other modeling approaches. The assessment also estimates unreported catches using catch and effort data following methods similar to those applied in previous assessments. After applying best practices from the workshop recommendations for filtering for CPUE calculation, PIFSC scientists applied model selection techniques to select the best structural form to standardize CPUE. CPUE in the model was split into two time series, fishing years 1948-2003, and fishing years 2003-2015 to accommodate new effort reporting from a change in reporting form by the State of Hawaii in October 2002.

NOAA Fisheries and the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council announced the review of the 2017 Benchmark Stock Assessment for the Main Hawaiian Islands Deep 7 Bottomfish Complex in the Federal Register for November 13-17, 2017.

Learn more about the WPSAR process