Report of the International Review of some aspects of the Island Closure Experiment

The Panel, which met virtually, was established to provide responses to three key questions related to two different approaches used to estimate the effects of fishery closures around penguin colonies on the dynamics of penguin populations. The expected outcomes of the review were YES/NO answers, with a short rationale (see Appendix for the Terms of Reference for the review, including the expected outcomes). Unlike previous Panel reports, there are no detailed lists of research recommendations, although there are several avenues for additional research (see “additional details and comments”). The Panel appreciated the provision of well-written and structured questions and briefing documents, as well as the analyses conducted during the review. In particular, the two sets of analyses differ in several ways, and the Panel made some requests for additional analyses from Dr. Richard Sherley using his Bayesian estimation approach to better understand the effects of using individual versus aggregated data, i.e. the effects of weighting the data for each year/island (and month in some cases) by sample size rather than assuming that the residual error is homogeneous.