Greenland halibut stock state and fishery magement in the Barents Sea

Abstract

The subject of this article is an assessment of reference points and the state of the black halibut stock in the Barents Sea. Despite the abundance of information accumulated over the years of fishing and research, the uncertainty of the dynamics of the stock remains quite high. The article describes and analyzes all currently known sources of information about the state of the stock –data from surveys, fishing statistics and the age structure of catches. Several types of models are being built – production models and age-structured model. The MSY value at the level of 28–32 thousand tons were obtained as a result of applying three different approaches to stock modeling: production models, combining cohort and production models and constructing a yield-recruit curve based on cohort models data. Despite the much greater uncertainty in the estimates of biomass, the current fishing intensity can be considered close to optimal based on the estimates obtained.