Stock Assessment

Before making any kind of decision in life, a great place to start is to identify the best information available to help inform the decision. This is exactly what we do when providing science advice for making decisions about Canada’s fisheries.

After collecting data about fish stocks, our science staff work to make sense of it.

This analysis is called “Stock Assessment”- It’s step 2 in our “Data to Decision” process.

Biologists use math to find and describe patterns like: How many fish are in the sea? Are the stocks getting bigger? Smaller? If we continue with our current fishing pressure, what will the stocks look like in 10 years? What will they look like if we fish more or less?

This analysis helps our scientists, managers, and others see how a stock is doing, how it’s changed over time, and even how it might do in the future.