Ideas on evaluating the value of monitoring data and the vulnerability of management advice to data degradation on the US West Coast

The costs and values of monitoring is an important consideration for natural resource management. For example, fishery independent surveys are financially demanding. Yet, sound advice for fisheries management relies on high quality survey data. On the West Coast, most stock assessment models use indices of abundance and age composition data from surveys to estimate biomass available to fisheries and inform decisions about harvest levels. Static or declining federal budgets translate to fewer dollars available to conduct fishery independent surveys. NWFSC currently faces difficult decisions about allocation of resources among surveys. In order to minimize the impact of potential reductions in survey funding and make better decisions about allocating funding, understanding the consequences of reduced survey data on assessment models is a key challenge. Recent work by the NWFSC assessment team investigated retrospective scenarios that reduced survey data by 50%, which, among other impacts, could have led to triggering the “40-10” control rule for several rockfish species. Using that study as motivation, in this talk, I will discuss (and solicit) ideas for expanding on that work with potential approaches to 1) identify target species whose management is likely vulnerable to changes in survey effort, 2) better demonstrate the costs and values of fisheries independent surveys, and 3) provide advice on how to lessen the effects of reduced budgets for monitoring.