Working Group on the Biology and Assessment of Deep-sea Fisheries Resources (WGDEEP)

The ICES working group on biology and assessment of deep-sea fisheries resources (WGDEEP) provides scientific advice on 29 assessment units including stocks of deep-water species and those on shelf areas and in deep waters.

Advice is provided every other year for each stock, except for stocks from ICES Division 5.a (Iceland) with annual advice.

Due to the Covid 19 disruption, Iceland did not request advice for local stocks. First draft of advice was thus prepared for 13 stocks out of the 29. For the same reason, the meeting was conducted entirely by web-based correspondence. In response most discussions that were not pivotal for advisory work this year were postponed to next year’s meeting. Available time-series for international landings and discards, fishing effort, survey indices and biological information were updated for all stocks and are presented in Sections 4–15 of the report.

An important topic that was discussed regarded boarders of species whose distribution extends between two advisory bodies. In WGDEEP the issue is particularly relevant for blackspot sea-bream stock in ICES Subarea 9.