The Ecosystem-Based Management Subcommittee of the Pacific Fishery Management Council’s (Pacific Council) Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC) will convene an online meeting. The SSC Ecosystem-Based Management Subcommittee meeting is open to the public and will be held Monday, August 5 from 1-5 p.m. (Pacific Time) or when business for the day has been completed.
This meeting is being conducted remotely with a web broadcast that provides the opportunity for remote public comment. In the event an outage occurs or technical issues arise that impact the experience of remote attendees, we will attempt to resolve them but ultimately we cannot guarantee that they will be resolved satisfactorily.
Purpose of the meeting
The purpose of the SSC ES meeting is to review a methodological framework to incorporate ecosystem risk evaluation tables in the current Council process and any intersection with the SSC’s scientific uncertainty buffers and stock category designations which result from the stock assessment process. Ecosystem risk evaluation tables were developed by the Council’s Ecosystem Workgroup for several example groundfish species (i.e. sablefish and petrale sole), and the approach was reviewed by the SSC Ecosystem-Based Management and Groundfish Subcommittees in September 2023. At this meeting, the SSC ES will review any new developments to the risk table approach, including methodological frameworks for evaluating the ecosystem, assessment uncertainty, and population dynamics considerations the risk tables contain, and provide example applications for fisheries management. In March 2024, the Pacific Council also requested a retrospective analysis of how risk tables would have impacted decision-making in past groundfish assessments if they had been used in the manner currently envisioned. Sablefish was selected for a full assessment and petrale sole for a catch-only projection in the 2025 stock assessment cycle. Thus, the Subcommittee may focus on consideration or pathways for incorporation of these species risk tables in the upcoming stock assessment cycle and 2027-2028 harvest specification process.