Abstract: We conducted a retrospective analysis of the impact of 50% sampling reduction in intensity or frequency of the U.S. West Coast GroundfishBottom Trawl survey. The influence of the survey reductions on assessment outputs and catch limits for 11 species depends upon species life-history, frequency of occurrence in the survey, and the data-richness of each assessment. All approaches to reducing survey sampling led to increased uncertainty in stock assessment results, especially for rarer species, for species which have not been heavily exploited, and for data-moderate assessments, which rely more heavily on survey data.
