Improving the knowledge basis for advice on North Sea horse mackerel : developing new methods to get insight on stock boundaries and abundance

The North Sea horse mackerel stock is currently classified by ICES as a data poor stock, for which the catch advice is based on the trend in an abundance index. The development of an analytical stock assessment, necessary to give more accurate advice, is hampered by a number of limitations on the input data, among which the most important are the poor quality of catch-at-age data and the absence of a targeted survey for North Sea horse mackerel. The aim of this project was to study possibilities to improve the data quality used for an analytical stock assessment model.