Proposal for potential future island closures

It is possible that following the Panel’s review and its presentation to the Minister of best estimates of the trade-off between benefits to the penguins and costs to the industry of future closures, she might make the policy decision to continue with closures. This document consequently sets out a range of suggestions related to the specifications/design of such a future closure programme. First, some proposals are made for the principles to underly this design. Then specific suggestions are made for that design, though at this time some have to be “conceptual” only, as the requisite information concerning the future monitoring planned has yet to be provided. Furthermore, simulation analyses to estimate experimental power would in any case need to follow that provision to be able to make specific proposals. A key aspect is to try to keep response variable collection as compatible as possible with that which applied during the ICE; this is so that the resultant “longer” time series of such data would provide desirable improvements in the precision of existing estimates of the closure effect, as well as meaningful results from future monitoring becoming available in less than a decade.