Deepwater fish populations are often characterized by their life-history as being highly susceptible to overexploitation. Moreover, dependent fisheries often develop rapidly, so overexploitation may occur before resource dynamics are quantified sufficiently to assess safe biological limits. It is therefore crucial to employ assessment methods that make the best use of limited data and management procedures that account for large uncertainties. This review provides a critical synthesis of assessment and management approaches for deepwater fisheries. Given limitations in the data, it is clear that assessments are likely to benefit from the application of derived relationships between life-history characteristics and the sharing of this and other information across stocks. It is important that uncertainty in assessment results is represented adequately, and management methods must in turn ensure that decision mechanisms are robust to an incomplete picture of resource dynamics. This requires construction and testing of harvest control rules within a simulation framework. Harvest control rules themselves, however, need not be complicated, and simple empirical approaches can be adequate for situations in which only relative changes in biomass can be discerned from the data. Development and testing of these control rules is likely to prove a productive area of future research.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	fisheries, stock assessment
Research Division:	Agricultural and Veterinary Sciences
Research Group:	Fisheries Sciences
Research Field:	Aquatic Ecosystem Studies and Stock Assessment
Objective Division:	Expanding Knowledge
Objective Group:	Expanding Knowledge
Objective Field:	Expanding Knowledge in the Environmental Sciences
Author:	Blanchard, JL (Dr Julia Blanchard)
ID Code:	100488
Year Published:	2012
Web of Science® Times Cited:	12
Deposited By:	Sustainable Marine Research Collaboration
Deposited On:	2015-05-18
Last Modified:	2015-09-03
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