15 September 2023: Report of the Benchmark Workshop for Harp and Hooded Seals now available.

The Benchmark Workshop for Harp and Hooded Seals (WKBSEALS) was held from the 22nd to the 26th of May 2023 at the ICES headquarters in Copenhagen, co-chaired by Alejandro Buren (Argentina) and Daniel Howell (Norway), and with both online and in-person participants from Canada, Greenland, the UK and Norway.

The benchmark was tasked with evaluating proposed developments to the assessment model used for two stocks of harp seals, namely the East Ice (White Sea/Barents Sea) and West Ice (Greenland sea) stocks, and one stock of hooded seals (West Ice) in the Northeast Atlantic. The benchmark concluded that there were sufficient data to produce an assessment model for the West Ice stock of harp seals but that data were insufficient for the East Ice harp seal stock and too weak a signal for the West Ice hooded seals for viable assessments for these stocks.

The report of this workshop is now available and can be found here.