Further projections of the west coast rock lobster resource for a range of future constant catch and poaching scenarios

The 2016 assessment for super-area A1+2 has been further improved. The results in a recent document produced unexpectedly poor performance in the future even under a zero catch. Further time has now been spent on improving the assessment, primarily by exploring alternative starting points for recruitment parameters in the estimation procedure. The updated results are shown in the Appendix and show a greatly improved –lnL, indicating a much better fit to the available data. Future projections are now more optimistic.