Scientific advice is increasingly used to inform policy. Often, experts are asked give when stakes high, time pressure severe and uncertainty looms. In such environments, decisions may be guided by instincts priors, rather than reason. Yet, the extent of these intuitive judgements unknown. We use a database fish stock assessments detect quantify systematic tendency put too much weight on previo...

Retrospective patterns are commonly investigated to validate fish stock assessment models. A widely applied measure for retrospective bias is Mohn’s ρ and corresponding plots. However, can be interpreted differently by experts. To make decisions regarding significant less subjective, we proposed a post-sample significance test. As case studies, the state space model SAM with data on Northeast A...

Abstract Despite their growing socio‐economic importance globally, relatively little is understood about how crustacean stocks are assessed, which has potential to compromise fishery sustainability, especially under heavy exploitation and environmental changes. To inform stock assessment model application for emergent fisheries, we evaluated use available in the RAM Legacy Database (RAMLDB) evo...

Abstract Indices of relative abundance are one the most important inputs into a stock assessment model. For many species, we must rely on several indices that routinely conflict with each other and which may result in biased uncertain outputs. Here, explored whether reconciled trends obtained from dynamic factor analysis (DFA) applied to conflicting can be used as trend input We simulated an ag...