Report of the PSARC Groundfish Subcommittee meeting, November 22-25, 1999

This is evident from an examination of Appendix 6. There is an urgent need for a coordinated approach to planning the Subcommittees agenda to ensure that stocks in most need of assessments receive the required attention and that the management system is robust to the ability of the assessment process to provide the necessary advice. [...] A suggestion was made to note the change in selectivity in recent years in the text of the assessment, and that the selectivity be accounted for in a subsequent assessment. [...] Increasing the number of sets would be expected to reduce the standard deviation of the mean in proportion to the square root of the number of observations. [...] The reviewer questioned the observation from the last assessment that the abundance of Pacific cod in the Hecate Strait area is very low. [...] The reviewer noted the lack of statistical justification for the definitions of the negative log likelihood and Bayes prior components of the model objective function and the form of the movement component of the model.