An evaluation on four potential SLAs for West Greenland humpback and bowhead whales using the agreed evaluation and robustness trials

Abstract

In what is an initial analysis, four possible SLAs are run for the evaluation and robustness trials developed at the Fourth AWMP Workshop for West Greenland humpbacks and bowhead whales. A simple integrative approach to provide a ready coarse comparison of the performance of each across all these trials is put forward, based on the lower 5%-iles of the N9 (need satisfaction) and D1 (depletion) performance statistics. There was generally little to choose between the four SLAs considered in terms of performance. There was a qualitative difference between the two species: for humpback the SLA using the most recent abundance estimate only was preferred, whereas for bowheads the preference was to use all estimates with little downweighting for time since the survey. However, none of the SLAs considered performed adequately in terms of resource depletion for the lowest MSYR1+ values considered.