Understanding the status of fish stocks is a critical step in ensuring the ecological and economic sustainability of marine ecosystems. However, at least half of global catch and a vast majority of global fisheries lack formal stock assessments, largely due to a lack of sufficient data. Catch data, loosely referring to any catch records be it inclusive of discards or not, are the only type of fishery data available across a wide range of fisheries at a global scale. This has given rise to a long list of so-called “catch-only” models, intended to estimate aspects of stock status based primarily on characteristics of a fishery's catch history. In this paper, we review the history, performance and potential of “catch-only” models to estimate stock biomass status. While individual catch-only models often report good performance, repeated efforts to examine the performance of these models have consistently found them to be imprecise and biased when applied to new data-limited fisheries. We demonstrate that a large reason for this is the simple lack of information on stock status contained in the shape of a catch history alone. Off-the-shelf use of catch-only models can lead to poor and biased estimates of stock status, potentially hindering efforts at effective management.

中文翻译：

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仅捕捞库存评估模型的历史和评估

了解鱼类种群的状况是确保海洋生态系统生态和经济可持续性的关键步骤。然而，至少一半的全球渔获量和绝大多数全球渔业缺乏正式的种群评估，主要是由于缺乏足够的数据。捕捞数据，泛指任何捕捞记录，无论是否包括丢弃物，是全球范围内广泛渔业中唯一可用的渔业数据类型。这产生了一长串所谓的“仅捕捞”模型，旨在主要根据渔业捕捞历史的特征来估计种群状况的各个方面。在本文中，我们回顾了“仅捕捞”模型的历史、性能和潜力，以估计种群生物量状况。虽然个别仅捕获模型通常报告良好的性能，反复检查这些模型的性能的努力始终发现它们在应用于新的数据有限的渔业时是不精确和有偏见的。我们证明，造成这种情况的一个重要原因是仅在捕获历史的形式中就缺乏有关库存状态的信息。现成的使用只捕捞模型可能导致对库存状况的估计不佳和有偏差，可能会阻碍有效管理的努力。