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

Gerry Richter, Groundfish Advisory Panel

A review of data-moderate assessments was conducted by a STAR Review Panel (Panel) at th

Sablefish STAR Panel Report Review Panel Members:

al. 2011) and Dover sole (Hicks and Wetzel 2011). This report covers only the review of sablefish, but the Panel considered and discussed many issues common to both stock assessments. 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). The West Coast sablefish 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 to the Panelists several weeks before the Panel meeting, subsequent to the distribution, but prior to the meeting, the STAT discovered an error in the SS3 code associated with time-varying age-based selectivity curves. Although the corrected code produced only minor changes to the assessment results, many of the results presented in the draft document were erroneous. Prior to the STAR Panel meeting the STAT was able to redo the analyses using the corrected program and for the meeting the STAT provided a partially revised assessment in which results produced by the corrected SS3 program were presented in the Executive Summary. Results presented by the STAT during the STAR Panel meeting wer

Prepared by: Pacific Fishery Management Council

2. Identification of Pacific Coast Salmon Essential Fish Habitat...............................................................