Yes, we plan to do more on those species.
You mention capelin. We recognize that we have a gap to fill in our knowledge of capelin. In using the funding from budget 2016, we plan to improve our knowledge of capelin. For example, we plan, in fiscal year 2018-19, to conduct a major survey of the whole capelin stock off Newfoundland and Labrador. This approach should give us an opportunity in the future to develop real abundance indices of the value of biomass for this stock.
This is roughly a $2.3-million investment for that year. I expect that once this development is done, it will fill an important gap in our knowledge of capelin. We recognize that it's really a key species that lives with cod.
For the cod assessment, currently the frequency of the full assessment of the cod stock is three years. We fully recognize the importance of that stock, but in terms of the frequency, I would say that the approach we have put in place currently is probably adequate.
I'm going to explain what I mean by that. We made a substantial improvement in our approach to assess the stock in 2016. We have a very good model and a more robust approach. We now can forecast three years in advance when we provide this assessment.
We monitor carefully the species each year. Each year we do an update on the stock, as we did in March 2017. Moreover, as part of the recommendation of the commissioner's report, we have developed indicators that would trigger an earlier assessment during interim years if something happened. This is quite important.
We don't want to miss anything important that could put the resource at risk. So, during interim years, if we see something happening that is not what we expected, we can immediately do a full assessment and make sure that we act rapidly on the stock.