Evaluation of Management Strategies for the Mixed North Sea Roundfish Fisheries with the FLR Framework

Most demersal stocks keep being overexploited despite the numerous management measures implemented. New approaches in methods for providing scientific advice to fisheries management include simulation-based MSE (Management Strategy Evaluation), aiming at identifying management strategies robust to various sources of uncertainties. MSE are simulation models including management scenarios and allowing for testing alternative plausible hypotheses about stocks and fleets dynamics. FLR (Fisheries Library in R) is an open-source collection of tools providing a generic modelling framework for constructing such MSE. FLR has been developed under the statistical computing language "R" in EU-funded research projects, and provides various compatible packages which can be freely combined by the user, thus insuring complete flexibility.