Provision of fisheries management advice requires

• Assessment of stock status relative to reference points
• Prediction of the response of a stock to management, and
• Validation i.e. checking that predictions are consistent with reality.

• Risk is an uncertainty that matters
• What matters are management objectives

• Identification of management objectives
• Selection of hypotheses for the OM
• Conditioning the OM based on data and knowledge, and possible weighting and rejection of hypotheses
• Identifying candidate management strategies
• Running the Management Procedure (MP) as a feedback control in order to simulate the long-term impact of management; and
• Identifying the MPs that robustly meet management objectives.

• The best MP is therefore an emergent property
• Once the management objectives have been identified and
• Uncertainty about the system has been characterised
• The task is simply find the best MP

Sea++ is developing an interactive web application to help communicate the process of conducting management strategy evaluations (MSE) in a succinct and visual form.

The idea is to focus on several key aspects, including: accounting for uncertainty, model reliability, and the overall message of the simulation results.

https://pl202.shinyapps.io/Swordfish_MSE_Vis/

The first image represents the context of uncertainty out of which various scenarios for testing management procedures are usually constructed.

To illustrate the many kinds of unknown/uncertain features of the system which the models aim to represent we used an infographic approach.

The main image uses a physical space to represent a conceptual space with recognisible elements: fishing vessels, adult fish, juvenile fish, environment, non-target species and incidental catch such as birds and turtles, and discards.

This app follows developments in JAKFISH and MYFISH EU research projects that aimed to create a visual key that qualitatively addresses main concerns such as model inputs in terms of data and knowledge.

Additionally, we have now included model validation.