Assessment of the Pacific sardine resource in 2020 for U.S. management in 2020-2021

The following Pacific sardine assessment update was conducted to inform U.S. fishery management for the cycle that begins July 1, 2020 and ends June 30, 2021. The 2020 base model was reviewed at the STAR Panel in February 2020, and has many features found in the previous model ALT (2017-2019). This assessment focuses on the northern subpopulation of Pacific sardine (NSP) that ranges from northern Baja California, M´exico to British Columbia, Canada and extends up to 300 nm offshore. In all past assessments, the default approach has been to assume that all catches landed in ports from Ensenada (ENS) to British Columbia (BC) were from the northern subpopulation. There is now general scientific consensus that catches landed in the Southern California Bight (SCB, i.e., Ensenada and southern California) likely represent a mixture of the southern subpopulation (warm months) and northern subpopulation (cool months) (Felix-Uraga et al. 2004, 2005, Zwolinski et al. 2011, Garcia-Morales et al. 2012, Demer and Zwolinski 2014). Although the ranges of the northern and southern subpopulations can overlap within the SCB, the adult spawning stocks likely move north and south in synchrony each year and do not occupy the same space simultaneously to any significant extent (Garcia-Morales et al. 2012). Satellite oceanography data (Demer and Zwolinski 2014) were used to partition catch data from Ensenada (ENS) and southern California (SCA) ports to exclude both landings and biological compositions attributed to the southern subpopulation. The assessment includes sardine landings (mt) from six major fishing regions: Ensenada (ENS), southern California (SCA), central California (CCA), Oregon (OR), Washington (WA), and British Columbia (BC). Landings for each port and for the NSP over the modeled years/seasons are below in Table ES-1. 2020 NMFS (National Marine Fisheries Service) SWFSC (Southwest Fisheries Science Center) Submitted https://doi.org/10.25923/r2fz-4y79 Public Domain 1864