Update on the seabird component of the common oceans tuna project – seabird by-catch assessment workshops

This paper provides the outcomes of two Regional Seabird Bycatch Pre-assessment Workshops held in early 2017, together with some explanatory background. An agreed next step is that a data preparation workshop, along the lines of stock assessment workshops and CPUE standardisation processes, should be held in February 2018. Further, intersessional work before and after the data preparation workshop is highly desirable. The scale of this evaluation effort will be limited to the Southern Hemisphere.