Objectives

This Action has 5 major objectives:

• To establish a network of researchers, including assessment scientists and reproduction biologists, with the common interest to improve the assessment methodology for the sustainable exploitation of marine fish resources.
• Coordinate current and future research on fish reproduction as applicable to fisheries assessment and management to develop common sampling and technical protocols, and improve methodology.
• Coordinate national sampling programs to improve data availability for a range of different stocks.
• Promote the implementation of stock reproductive potential into current stock assessment and advice to improve fisheries management.
• Dissemination of progress within this field to both the network and to the wider scientific community and end-users via open public meetings and conferences, scientific missions and website.

The main objectives will be fulfilled after attaining the following 12 subsidiary goals:

1. Reconstruct historical time series of key components of reproductive potential for selected data-rich stocks to determine how variable these components are over time and space on scales relevant to management.
2. Evaluate whether temporal trends in these key components of stock reproductive potential are affected by environment, the state or dynamics of the ecosystem and fishing.
3. Develop statistical tools for representing uncertainty in medium-term projections of stock reproductive potential under different scenarios depicting future states of the environment, the ecosystem or the intensity of fishing pressure.
4. Identification of different reproductive strategy of marine fishes.
5. Identify type, quantity and quality of data that should be collected to estimate reproductive potential.
6. Classification of the relevance of each variable will be provided varying with the capability of obtaining the specific data and its relevance for the estimation of stock reproductive potential.
7. Development of international coordinated sampling protocols for basic variables to estimate the reproductive potential.
8. Identify current stock assessment procedures that can incorporate stock reproductive potential.
9. Incorporate SRP into current stock assessment procedures and into the formulation of management advice.
10. Compare current traditional assessments (including biological references points) with methods that incorporate SRP.
11. Explore new techniques to incorporate SRP in to the assessment of commercially exploited fish stocks.
12. Explore the interrelationships between environment and SRP on fish stock dynamics and its implications for the assessment of stocks and management advice.