WP11 Catch data improvements.

Historical catch data are very important for the results of the present project. Therefore, biases, mis-reporting, discards, and related issues will be scrutinized with the aim of correcting the time series. Issues that were sensitive decades ago might now be possible to treat objectively and scientifically. Conversion factors for gutted fish to whole fish, overfilling fish boxes to be on the “safe” side in relation to quota management and the like, might have biased the current time series. The current project’s link to fisher’s organizations gives a better opportunity to verify these suspicions with input from fishers. There have been attempts in the scientific literature to correct for such things by e.g. ICES and “The Sea Around Us” –project. Such sources of information will be evaluated. There will be a focus on a limited number of case studies in order to show the magnitude of influence on the obtained Fmsy reference point estimates by the project.