Future work statements by GFSC from 2023 public comment review

[brianlangseth-NOAA]

This year we will need to address GFSC recommendations from the last (2021) stock assessment. This will not be straightforward. The 2021 review process was convoluted (see discussion #9), and some subcommittee recommendations from 2021 were incorporated into later versions of the 2021 assessment.

Here are some future work statements from the GFSC subcommittee report on the Jan 2024 review of public comments. I am unclear whether we will need to include these within the report.

Most are not applicable to us but including here nonetheless:

• Many of the decisions taken when constructing the base model were constrained by the TOR for data-moderate assessments (Appendix J of the GTORA). The recent datamoderate assessment for rex sole included age data in the assessment and estimated growth, an option not available to the STAT for California quillback rockfish. The SSC should consider whether there should be more “flexibility” in which data can be included in datamoderate assessments and which parameters can be estimated.
• The GTORA should be updated to include that assessments should report results of sensitivity tests where parameters that have informative priors (e.g., M and steepness) are estimated (with the prior).
• The prior for h should be revisited given the results of recent assessments and recent advancements in methods for constructing h priors, such as the approach developed by Marc Mangel (e.g., Mangel et al., 2010).
• The meeting noted that rejecting the 2021 assessment of quillback rockfish would mean that OFLs for quillback would be based on DB-SRA, a “catch-only” method of stock assessment, which is known to be very inaccurate (Free et al., 2020). Research should be conducted to assess what constitutes “too uncertain” given the default of returning to the last assessment, especially in the context of assessments for which there are no previous full or data-moderate assessments.

Others are relevant, with the first being clearly applicable and the other two not direct recommendations to us

• The next assessment of quillback rockfish in California should explore the development of a recreational and/or CCFRP-based index of abundance, comparable to those developed in recent assessments for vermilion, copper, and other nearshore rockfish species.
• Dr. Maunder noted that turning off the sum-to-zero constraint on penalty in Stock Synthesis increases the value of terminal year depletion. This issue was not raised in the earlier Public Comment, and the SSC should consider this matter when revising the GTORA and APGSA.
• Dr. Maunder noted that the estimated variances for some recruitment deviations exceeded the value of σR, which is unusual (though has occasionally been seen in other assessments) and unexpected, and may indicate model misspecification. This issue was not raised in the earlier Public Comment and should form the basis for further exploration and could be a diagnostic for future data-moderate assessments.