Incorporating climate information into rebuilding plans for overfished groundfish species of the U.S. west coast

Rebuilding plans are required by the U.S. Sustainable Fisheries Act (1996) for stocks that are designated to be overfished, including several stocks of groundfish on the U.S. west coast. Despite evidence for climate effects on groundfish recruitment, the analyses that underlie rebuilding plans have not incorporated those effects. We extended the conventional approach used to conduct rebuilding analyses to evaluate the sensitivity of outputs from those analyses to two hypotheses about climate effects on recruitment (temporal autocorrelation due to unknown factors, and reduction in expected recruitment due to a delay in the date of spring transition) for an overfished stock, Pacific ocean perch (Sebastes alutus). We found that catch limits, probabilities of rebuilding to target levels, and times for rebuilding were sensitive to assumptions about recruitment, and those assumptions may have an important influence on management decisions. The Pacific Fisheries Management Council currently makes trade-offs between time for rebuilding and catch limits using outputs of rebuilding analyses combined with social and economic considerations, but in the future, account could also be taken of information on climate effects on recruitment.