Comparable west coast rock lobster catch and effort data up to 31 March 2016 for the past five seasons, with implications for exceptional circumstances declarations

A FIMS survey has been conducted for super-area 8+ only for the 2015 season. Nevertheless, using the data that are available from the fishery (until 31 March 2015), the resource indices for each super-area can still be compared with the threshold levels below which Exceptional Circumstances (ECs) are invoked (see Appendix of FISHERIES/2015/AUG/SWG-WCRL/26 for the most recent example of these analyses) by following the procedure below.

As the trap and bakkie data currently available for the 2015 season are “nominal” data and have not yet been standardised using GLM analyses, one needs to scale these nominal data (as presented in Table 1) to the 2011-2014 GLM standardised values, in order to use them to calculate combined indices for each super-area.