Description of work
Three new approaches for making fishery management advice will be carried out:

1) Assessment models including stock interactions to support a multi-species management strategy will be used. Based on existing knowledge on species interactions, distribution, and climatic and ecosystem states, uncertainty evaluations and sensitivity analysis, a method will be developed to find a data collection strategy that is optimal for assessing the stock.

2) Data collection on key dynamics will be optimized to improve parameters in present standard assessment tools.

3) The inclusion of one or more indicators as part of the harvest control rule will be tested. E.g. indicators describing the state of the ecosystem as a trigger to more careful action when the state is thought to cause lower productivity in an exploited stock (an early warning signal). This would be an alternative to building these aspects directly into the assessment and management models. This approach may be less demanding than developing a multi-species model, which is unlikely for all assessed stocks.
This approach demands that indicators are found to be informative in a management context. How indicators can be included as part of stock assessment/evaluation and  management decisions or harvest control rules  will be explored and developed in this WP.

All three approaches will be evaluated and compared with the present approaches in fishery management advice.

Relation to other WPs
This WP will be a synthesis of all other WPs, from WP1 to WP4.