STAT Team Members Present:

review a draft stock assessment document for Dover sole that had been prepared by prepared by Hicks and Wetzel (2011). The Panel operated under the Pacific Fishery Management Council’s (PFMC) Terms of Reference for the Groundfish Stock Assessment and Review Process for 2011-2012 (PFMC 2010). This same panel also reviewed a draft assessment for sablefish. The Dover sole stock assessment was conducted using a recent version of Stock Synthesis 3 (SS3 ver3.21f) applied to data from several sources. Although a draft assessment document was distributed on schedule before the Panel meeting, subsequent to the distribution but prior to the meeting the STAT discovered an error in its reconstructed catches for WA. Prior to the meeting a new base case was run and this was used during the meeting as a starting place. The corrected run produced only minor changes to distributed base case assessment results; nevertheless, the results presented in the draft document were erroneous. Results presented by the STAT during the STAR Panel meeting were based on runs using the corrected catch data. Because the corrected catch streams make little difference, conclusions drawn from analyses using the uncorrected data are still valid and were referred to during the review. The author stated that tables and figures in the body of the assessment document will be corrected for the version of th