Herring were linked to 3 sensitive predator types with adequate data to justify modeling; no exisitng model addressed all objectives and analytical time was limited to <1 year. Three control rule types--Constant catch, conditional constant catch, and 15% restriction on change--were rejected at the second stakeholder meeting for poor fishery and predator performance. Supplemental food web modeling showed tradeoffs between forage groups

• Working group of habitat, biology, stock assessment, management, economic and social scientists developed:

  • draft conceptual models of high risk elements, linkages
  • dataset identification and gap analysis for each element and link
  • draft questions that the Council could persue with additional work ]

• Final conceptual model and supporting information at December 2019 Council meeting

• Council may then elect to proceed with management strategy evaluation (MSE) using the information from conceptual modeling as a basis

trying to ge the tooltip part working but may not by next week; xaringan doesnt handle htmlwidgets the same as pure html!

This is an important paper both because it demonstrates the importance of addressing strong species interactions, and it shows that measures of fit do not indicate good model predictive performance. Ignoring process error caused bias, but much smaller than ignoring species interactions. See also Vanessa's earlier paper evaluating diet data interactions with multispecies models

-Climate change is causing regime shifts and distribution shifts for NE groundfish species -Current research by Kentner and Johnson shows that if carbon emissions are left unchecked, these changes will accelerate in the coming years -to the point where some species such as cod may be absent from our waters by 2100 -Perretti et al. found regime shifts of increased fish recruitment (red fish in 1990s) corresponding to dominance of small bodied copepods in the system -Smith et al. are working on fish condition factor analyses (fish fatness) which show similar patterns of high condition (dark blue) during the 90s, followed by low condition in the 2000s and improved condition for most species in the 2010s -GAM analyses are indicating that these trends in condition are related to temperature changes and copepod size structure, but are not likely related to density dependence for most species -implications for growth, reproduction, TACs etc.

A new version of Atlantis NEUS is being developed at the NEFSC to meet research needs and increase utility for management councils. While the box structure stayed the same, the flows across the boxes were updated to better reflect the hydrography. Additionally, every species managed by the NEFMC, MAFMC or ASFMC was placed into its own functional group rather than many of them being aggregated with similar species, basically doubling the number of functional groups. Can also mention Joe's project to put in climate hindcast and forecast for climate scenario and MSE capability.

Model reviews are critical to getting models used in management. NEFSC has participated in several processes in the past 2 years, both being reviewed (2018 CIE) and setting up and conducting reviews for other processes (WGSAM)

There are 6 scenarios (Top row of figure represents fixed rate scenarios . no ramping down of effort. The bottom row are scenarios where we ramp down the effort). From left to right in each row:

a. Functional group level. If biomass < 0.2*B0 for any group all catch for that functional group is treated as discards

b. Same as above but we also track individual species. (since a functional group as a whole may be fine but a species in it is not.). Catch is considered a discard

c. same as b but the threshold for elasmobranchs are increased

The vertices of each radar plot are indices we track in the model. The colors represent the initial exploitation rate used. Of course in the ramp down, we may start at 0.4 exploitation, but at year 53 it may be down to 0.1. This isn't displayed.