Science Advisory Report 2020/022

Assessment of the dependability of fishery catch monitoring programs

Summary

• The productivity and susceptibility traits in the consequence descriptors of the reviewed Risk Screening Tool (RST) are considered sufficient to characterize vulnerability of stocks / populations for the purpose of establishing the consequences of fisheries removals to long-term sustainability. Advice on revised consequence descriptors related to removals is provided.
• The Quality Assessment Tool (QAT) can assess quality of monitoring activities at the stock / population level, for a single fishery or a combination of fisheries. The results of the RST and QAT are used together to determine dependability.
• The results of the RST and QAT are not prescriptive in how specific fisheries monitoring programs should be conducted, rather they determine which fisheries monitoring program changes could be considered with the objective of improving the quality scoring associated with reducing bias and / or uncertainty and assessing cost-efficiencies.
• Minimum values for quality from the QAT, as a function of conservation risk from the RST, are provided as guidance rather than absolute values and the choice of threshold values may change as new information is obtained on performance and improvements are made to monitoring programs.
• The process of determining, evaluating and revising fishery monitoring programs involves the RST and QAT in a recursive process aimed at aligning conservation risk and data quality for estimation and/or limit compliance applications.
• The assessment of the adequacy of fishery monitoring needs to account for many aspects of the fishery assessment and management systems. The assessment of catch monitoring could be incorporated within the population assessment process, including the subsequent advisory committee meetings. The review of monitoring programs under the new policy could be phased in as part of the existing multi-year stock assessment cycle.

This Science Advisory Report is from the May 14 to 16, 2019 national peer review meeting to review the risk screening tool developed to assess and categorize the risk to target catch, bycatch and discards from the prosecution of Canadian fisheries. Additional publications from this meeting will be posted on the Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) Science Advisory Schedule as they become available.

Science Advisory Report 2020/022 (PDF, 590 KB)

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