WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) December 2, 2013 — The Massachusetts Marine Fisheries Institute (MFI) has released a summary of its Reference Points & Buffers Workshop which was held in New Bedford on November 6-8, 2013. This workshop is part of the MFI's end-to-end review of groundfish stock assessments.
MFI identified overfishing and rebuilding reference points and uncertainty buffers as topics that have major implications for the management of New England groundfish and deserved attention in the MFI's end-to-end review of groundfish stock assessments. Workshop participants reviewed several alternative approaches to estimating maximum sustainable yield reference points and concluded that multiple perspectives should be considered by scientists and communicated to fishery managers. They also offered recommendations for considering a broader set of ecological, social, and economic factors for risk-based approaches to uncertainty buffers and management procedures. Findings from the reference points workshop will be included with complementary findings from the MFI workshop on environmental change and the upcoming workshop on monitoring to form a set of recommendations that are intended to improve groundfish science and management.