26537 Improving Stock Assessments for Rockfishes Using Habitat-referenced Acoustic Surveys in the Gulf of Alaska Project Published / External 26536 S&T RFP Funded Projects Project In Work Benefits to stock assessment and management: This project builds on earlier work to assess rockfishes in untrawlable habitat, and will benefit stock assessments for the FSSI stocks of GOA dusky rockfish, northern rockfish, and Pacific Ocean perch in several ways. Biomass estimates can be refined by accounting for untrawlable regions in the survey area to better estimate the survey catchability coefficient (q), which largely reflects the availability of the population to the survey gear. Estimates of q for Alaska rockfishes are currently hypothesized to reflect the differential densities between trawlable and untrawlable habitats, and empirical data would improve specification of Bayesian priors on q. Methods developed here and knowledge gained through this and related studies can ultimately be used to begin time series of rockfish abundance estimates in untrawlable areas to complement traditional BT survey data. Additionally, the proposed experimental design is flexible enough that the work could easily be expanded to additional sites that could be sampled using AC survey methods to refine our proposed summer 2015 estimates. This project was in response to the Habitat Information for Stock Assessment RFP. Theme abundance estimates Theme acoustic surveys Theme biomass estimates Theme habitat information Theme rockfish Theme stock assessment Theme survey catchability coefficient Theme untrawlable habitat Alaska Fisheries Science Center Seattle WA USA 7600 Sand Point Way NE, Building 4 Point of Contact 2015 Person Wilson, Chris chris.wilson@noaa.gov Gulf of Alaska: http://www.marineregions.org/gazetteer.php?p=details&id=4312 gov.noaa.nmfs.inport:26537 Jeremy Mays 2015-08-19T19:50:15 SysAdmin InPortAdmin 2022-08-09T17:11:13 2016-05-18 Alaska Fisheries Science Center AFSC 7600 Sand Point Way N.E., Building 4 Seattle WA 98115 USA https://www.afsc.noaa.gov 0700-1700 Pacific Time 1001 Public No 2016-05-18 1 Year 2017-05-18