2015 Assessment of the Sculpin Complex in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands
February 09, 2015
In 2011, Bering Sea and BSAI sculpins were moved to a biennial assessment schedule to coincide with the frequency of trawl surveys in the Aleutian Islands (AI) and the eastern Bering Sea (EBS). These surveys occur in even years, and for these years, full assessment of sculpins in the BSAI will be conducted. The sculpin assessment is conducted with Tier 5 methods, in which a non-age-structured model is applied to a time series of survey biomass estimates to obtain the current estimated biomass. An exploitation rate is then applied to the estimated current biomass to obtain the ABC and OFL.
Changes in the input data: There were no changes made to the assessment inputs because this was an off-cycle year.
Changes in assessment methodology: There were no changes in assessment methodology, although it should be noted that the random effects survey averaging model was used in last year’s assessment. This information can be found in Appendix 1 of the 2014 BSAI sculpin complex assessment.