Testing approaches to determine relative stock abundance priors when setting catch recommendations using data-limited methods

Abstract Data-limited methods for managing stockshave expanded greatly over the last decade due to the necessity of quantitatively assessing exploited populations with limited information. A special category of such approaches is based on stockreduction analysis. These “catch-only” methods provide a way to handle low data availability, but also require as an input relative stockstatus (e.g., current biomass/initial biomass), a difficult to determine value that leads to large sensitivity in method output and performance. Published methods have been developed to devise informative priors for this quantity, but have not been evaluated together with the assessment methods. Here, relative stockabundance priors derived from elicited expert knowledge, vulnerability analysis and catch trends are compared to the common assumption of a stockbeing at B40% (40% of the initial biomass). The performance of each prior source is evaluated both in the degree of bias in estimating stockstatus and in the estimation procedure of catches for ten data-rich stockswith six stock assessmentmodels that require stockabundance input. The results from both performance metrics show that these alternative sources can provide more informative priors than assuming current biomass equals B40%, with priors elicited from stock assessmentexperts performing best. Finally, based on the findings of this work and the data requirements to construct a stockabundance prior, we make recommendations on how to navigate the options for devising a relative stockstatus prior.