Overview of the EU fair project 'STEREO' (Stock effects on recruitment relationships)

The overall objective of the STEREO project is to improve the methodology for determining limit reference points for the biomass of exploited fish stocks. Limit reference points set boundaries which are intended to constrain harvesting within safe biological limits, and are integral components of the decision making process in fisheries management. In most cases limits are currently estimated from historical time series data on spawning biomass and recruitment. However, the underlying stock-recruitment relationship is often poorly defined by such data and hence there is considerable uncertainty around many reference limits. This project will produce an operational scheme for refining functional form of stock-recruitment relationships by incorporating biological, spatial and temporal information on the stock structure, with the aim of reducing the uncertainty associated with the derived limits. The methodology will be developed for cod and haddock stocks around Iceland, Norway and in the North Sea as case studies.