A Proposed Set of Operating Models for Canadian Pollock in the Western Component (4Xopqrs+5Zc) to be used in Management Procedure Testing (or MSE)

A key feature that distinguishes the Management Procedure Approach (also termed Management Strategy Evaluation or MSE) from conventional “best assessments” is the importance of selecting not the (“best”) one assessment, but rather of ensuring that future resource trends will be satisfactory no matter which of a number plausible assessments most closely reflects the actual (but unknown) underlying situation of the resource. Frequent convention is to select a small number of such “Operating Models” (OMs), spanning the most important aspects of uncertainty in the assessment, for use as a Reference Set (RS) which provides the initial basis to develop and to tune a Management Procedure (MP). This paper develops a suggested set of four VPA-based OMs to provide a RS to serve as a basis for subsequent testing of candidate MPs. Two Statistical Catch-at-Age (SCAA) models are also developed to provide robustness tests for MPs developed using the VPA-based RS.