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2015 Tuna Stock Assessment Workshop
Wednesday, 17 June 2015 10:37

SAW_2015 OFP is conducting a week-long Stock Assessment Workshop at SPC headquarters in Noumea from 22 to 27 June 2015.  A total of 26 regional scientists, representing 15 South Pacific countries as well as observers from the Forum Fisheries Agency and University of the South Pacific will participate.  The workshop will be led by OFP’s two National Scientists, Dr. Stephen Brouwer and Dr. Steven Hare.  The long-term purpose of these workshops – which have been run since 2006 – is to increase regional fisheries officers ability to: understand and interpret the results from the regional oceanic fisheries stock assessments; communicate this information to fishery managers within their countries; and increase their confidence to participate in scientific discussions of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC), in particular during meetings of its Scientific Committee.  The workshop will feature presentations from several OFP scientists and material presented in lectures will be covered in daily practicals where participants will learn to conduct basic stock assessment analyses using models developed in Excel spreadsheets.

The workshop is intended to benefit regional fishery officers involved with scientific aspects of tuna fisheries.  Participants gain the best understanding of tuna stock assessments, in the long-term, from attendance at multiple workshops.  To this end, OFP has conducted these workshops almost annually since 2006.  Topics covered range from basic information on tuna life history to complex methods used to assess the status of tuna stocks to understanding implications for national fisheries.  The complete list of topics to be covered will be:

Topic 1 introduction and overview
Topic 2 Introduction to fish population dynamics
Topic 3 Key concepts of stock assessment modelling
Topic 4 Fisheries data collection for stock assessment
Topic 5 Fish growth
Topic 6 Recruitment
Topic 7 Natural and fishing mortality
Topic 8 Abundance indices – CPUE
Topic 9 Catchability and selectivity
Topic 10 Management outputs
Topic 11 Biological reference points
Topic 12 Assessing the assessment: Model fit
Topic 13 Use and interpretation of MFCL projections
Topic 14 Assessment implications for national fisheries
Topic 15 Stock assessment of Yellowfin tuna
Topic 16 Bio-economics

Additionally, a series of presentations on related fisheries issues, covering issues such as bycatch, ecosystem effects of fishing and range contraction will be given on the final day of the workshop.  The timing of the workshop is intended to prepare fishery officers for the upcoming WCPFC Scientific Committee. The complete agenda and list of presenters is illustrated in this fig2a pdf: 42 KB.

 
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