The use of personal knowledge in stock assessment
Original version
This report is not to be cited without prior reference to the authorAbstract
The focus on the precautionary approach, sustainable fisheries and ecological
management requires knowledge about the uncertainty of stock assessments.
An increasing number of working groups in the ICES system include
uncertainty estimates, and new reference points are being developed. When it
comes to the quality or the uncertainty of uncertainty estimates and reference
points, this is communicated by scarce comments in ACFM reports or
working group reports. Uncertainty is difficult to estimate, and to get a
picture of the quality of assessments it might be fruitful to study not only the
data and models used, but also how the models are used by the participants of
the ICES working groups. It seems that personal knowledge plays an
important role when results from each run are evaluated and the program
package is rerun with new options or other data. In this paper I discuss the
role personal knowledge plays in stock assessment and how this can reflect
the quality of the assessment.