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

Abstract

This paper provides results from the application of the software developed by Andre Punt for the West humpback whale trials as agreed at the AWMP Intersessional Workshop (IWC, 2014) to four potential SLAs. To facilitate comparison across different SLAs in an initial analysis only, a summary statistic developed by Brandão and Butterworth (2013) to reflect the improvement in the performance achieved by a candidate SLA compared to the extreme of a Strike Limit = Need approach was used to select the best performing SLA from a range of SLAs that were considered by Brandão and Butterworth (2013), two of which formed part of the ‘reference SLAs’ as given in IWC (2012). Variants of the selected SLA were than considered to address shortcomings in the performance of that SLA.