The Gulf of Maine cod SCAA assessment presented to the 2008 GARM III meetings is updated to take account of new data. Two Base Cases are put forward: one involving a Ricker form for the stock‐recruitment relationship, and the other treating expected recruitment as effectively independent of spawning biomass. The former provides a better fit to the spawning biomass and recruitment estimates, but is less robust by way of lesser precision and a strong retrospective pattern. Of a variety of sensitivity tests, increasing M from 0.2 to 0.3 to lessen the dome in the estimated selectivity‐at‐age vector leads to an improved likelihood and a resource estimated to be closer to its MSY biomass.
History
Department/Unit
Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, University of Cape Town