We use a whole variety of things to come up with our estimates of biomass.
As I mentioned, one of the key ones is certainly our research vessel survey time series. In the run of a year, taking about two and a half months in the autumn fishing, we typically organize and conduct this survey with a standardized trawl that's used the same way every single year, with very large coverage of the stock area, in which the net catches fish of a broad range of sizes. They're all measured; age is determined; and many are brought back to the laboratory. From that survey, at the end of each year we come up with an index of what the stock is doing.
When we put that annual value into a time series, it gives us a measure of where the biomass is. Then we bring in the information from the catch. We have a whole range of people out measuring fish from the catch, quantifying how much is caught, and what numbers of each age group are caught in the fishery each year and removed from the fishery. Then the assessment model reconciles the information and puts it together to come up with the estimates of biomass. We also use a lot of information about recruitment, which is what I mentioned: the numbers of young fish coming in.
Really, what we're doing is a study of population dynamics. We look at the factors that will increase the stock over time and then we look at the factors that will reduce it. We put them all together to come up with our estimates of biomass over time.
The other participants at the meeting contribute actively to the assessment. We have a lot of debate about the results. We have individual presentations from the FFAW. We sometimes have presentations from individual fishermen. Other academics from Memorial University come in and present their research findings. They're all considered in the preparation of the summary document from that meeting.
At the end of the meeting, there has to be agreement on what the assessment says about the biomass of the stock, and the agreement has to come not just from DFO scientists but from academia, from the non-governmental organizations, from the industry members themselves, and from the union. It's quite a broad-scale approach to it and very different from what it was before the time of the moratorium.