2015 Assessment of the Kamchatka Flounder Stock in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands
February 07, 2015
Starting in 2014, it was proposed that the Kamchatka flounder stock assessment was a candidate for full stock assessments in even years on a biennial basis in the Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands region. For 2015 an executive summary is prepared to provide management quantities and recommendations for the 2016 fishing season, even though a full Bering Sea shelf survey was conducted. Kamchatka flounder are managed as a Tier 3 stock using a statistical age-structured model as the primary assessment tool. The assessment model is not re-run for this update but instead, a projection model is run with updated catch information. This projection model run incorporates the most recent catch and provides estimates of 2016 and 2017 ABC and OFL without re-estimating the stock assessment model parameters or biological reference points. A full stock assessment document with updated assessment results is planned for the 2016 SAFE report.
Changes in the input data: The stock assessment model was not run for this update. New input data for the projection model included updating the 2015 catch and estimating the 2016 catch. The 2015 catch was 4,858 t as of mid- October. For the estimation of 2016 catch, the average of the 2014 and 2015 catches (5,658 t) was used.
For the 2016 fishery, the authors recommend the maximum allowable ABC of 9,500 t from the updated projection model. This value is an increase of 500 t (6%) over the 2015 ABC (9,000 t) that was also derived from Tier 3 methodology.