Exploration of a safe-guard criterion for OMP2018 in the eventuality that the M. capensis CPUE and survey indices of abundance drop too low

Abstract

A value is sought for the M. capensis combined CPUE and survey index of abundance J which would constitute the threshold below which additional (supra-OMP) management measures would need to be taken (probably in the form of moving the distribution of offshore trawling to deeper waters) to safeguard this resource in circumstances where its abundance had dropped too low. A simple approach suggests that a threshold value of 0.6 would be appropriate to identify and achieve some reasonable response to a recruitment failure, whilst limiting instances of responses to false positives where there was in fact no problem.