Initial Applications of Statistical Catch-at-Age Assessment Methodology to the Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic Winter Flounder Resource

SCAA is applied to the SNE winter flounder resource, for which past VPA assessments have been plagued by retrospective patterns. It is shown that these patterns can be removed by the combination of allowance for autocorrelation in the residuals of survey series fits to underlying abundance trends, and an increase in natural mortality over time commencing sometime during the 1990s.