Confronting transitions in fishery fleet structure and selectivity: Practical recommendations for integrated age-structured stock assessments based on simulation analysis

Abstract

Dynamic shifts in fleet structure and gear usage lead to complex implications for representing fishery selectivity in stock assessment models. There is generally a lack of consensus on how assessment models should be configured to confront changes in fishery fleet structure or associated selectivity forms, while balancing complexity-parsimony tradeoffs. We conducted a simulation analysis to evaluate the performance of alternative assessment models when confronted with fleet transitions among gear types, which included differences in: 1) rates of transition (i.e., a fast or slow transition among gears), and 2) selectivity forms for each modeled fleet (i.e., asymptotic or dome-shaped). In general, explicitly modelling fleet structure (i.e., multi-fleet models) performed well, but demonstrated bias in biomass estimates and management reference points when selectivity forms were mis-specified. Single-fleet models were only unbiased when time-varying selectivity (e.g., using time blocks or continuous formulations) was estimated to account for changes among gear types. Our results suggest that single-fleet models with time-varying fishery selectivity are adequate for operational management advice, but research oriented multi-fleet models should be used as validation tools to explore model consistency within single-fleet models.