State of the development of the workplan to improve the current assessment of yellowfin tuna

In 2018, the IOTC Scientific Committee (SC) adopted a workplan to reduce the uncertainties of the current stock assessment of Indian Ocean yellowfin tuna. In 2019, several tasks of the workplan have been addressed and reported to the 21st Working Party of Tropical Tunas (WPTT). However, the WPTT agreed that the progress on the workplan was insufficient to provide new management advice in 2019. The main reasons for this are the complexity of the endeavour, the lack of agreement on key model aspects and time constraints for a thorough examination of the new model during the WPTT meeting. However, the WPTT acknowledged the substantial amount of work conducted to improve the yellowfin assessment and requested that the Chair of the WPTT coordinates the full documentation of the work conducted inter-seasonally and during the WPTT and the tasks that still need to be addressed, to be presented to the SC in 2019. In this document, we summarise the progress of the different tasks of the workplan and identify paths to continue reducing the existing uncertainties on the dynamics of Indian Ocean yellowfin tuna.