Despite their potential to inform sustainable regional harvest and climate‐resilient fisheries management, spatial stock assessment models remain underused for management advice. To identify barriers that inhibit broader use of these methods, we conducted a blinded international simulation experiment mimicking real‐world stock assessment development when confronting spatial complexity. Seven analyst teams built spatially aggre...

Spatio‐temporal species distribution models can support fisheries assessments and management in marine and freshwater environments. However, the high costs of structured surveys often limit the spatio‐temporal coverage of the data available for modelling. To address this issue, we present a spatio‐temporal modelling approach integrating structured survey data with unstructured presence‐only data, which have greater spatio‐temp...

Spatial models enable understanding potential redistribution of marine resources associated with ecosystem drivers and climate change. Stock assessment platforms can incorporate spatial processes, but have not been widely implemented or simulation tested. To address this research gap, an international simulation experiment was organized. The study design was blinded to replicate uncertainty similar to a real‐world stock assess...

A robust assessment of the American eel ( Anguilla rostrata ) stock, required to guide conservation efforts, is challenged by the species’ vast range, high variability in demographic parameters and data inadequacies. Novel ideas and underutilised resources that may assist both analytic assessments and spatially oriented modelling include (1) species and environmental databases; (2) mining of data from scattered sources; (3) in...

Establishing appropriate aging procedures and growth models are two important steps for estimating reliable growth curves and in developing proper stock assessments. Lizardfishes have a strong influence on the structures of epibenthic communities and are important to the trawl fisheries of many coastal countries. For brushtooth lizardfish, Saurida undosquamis , the major species in the lizardfish catches of Taiwan, three issue...

Sharks (class Chondrichthyes, subclass Elasmobranchii) typically have a long lifespan, slow growth rate and low fecundity, leading to low productivity and hence relatively high vulnerability to fishing. Information for managing fisheries catches of elasmobranchs is often lacking, because elasmobranchs are usually non‐target species, often with low abundance. It is more feasible to develop management reference points for elasmo...

Growth shapes the life history of fishes. Establishing appropriate aging procedures and selecting representative growth models are important steps in developing stock assessments. Flyingfishes (Exocoetidae) have ecological, economic, and cultural importance to many coastal countries including Taiwan. There are 29 species of flyingfishes found in the Kuroshio Current off Taiwan and adjacent waters, comprising 56% of the flyingf...

Analysis of spawning biomass per‐recruit has been widely adopted in fisheries management. Fishing mortality expressed as spawning potential ratio (SPR) often requires a reference point as an appropriate proxy for the fishing mortality that supports a maximum sustainable yield— F MSY . To date, a single generic level between F 30% and F 40% is routinely used. Using records from stock assessments in the RAM Legacy Database (RAML...

The western and central Pacific Ocean supports the world's largest tuna fisheries. Since the 1990s, the purse‐seine fishery has increasingly fished in association with fish aggregating devices ( FAD s), which has increased catches of juvenile bigeye and yellowfin tunas and vulnerable bycatch species (e.g., sharks). This has raised concerns regarding the sustainability of these species’ populations and the supporting ecosystem,...

Accurate assessment of shark population status is essential for conservation but is often constrained by limited and unreliable data. To provide a basis for improved management of shark resources, we analyzed a long‐term record of species‐specific catches, sizes, and sexes of sharks collected by onboard observers in the western and central Pacific Ocean from 1995 to 2010. Using generalized linear models, we estimated populatio...

This study compares estimates of the census size of the spawning population with genetic estimates of effective current and long‐term population size for an abundant and commercially important marine invertebrate, the brown tiger prawn ( Penaeus esculentus ). Our aim was to focus on the relationship between genetic effective and census size that may provide a source of information for viability analyses of naturally occurring...