Abstract
Stock assessment methods vary among regions, reflecting local conditions, fishery management systems, available data, and historical developments. Contributions from the scientific community of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) had global impact on the advancement of stock assessment methods and applications. In the early to mid-1900s, single species demographic models were applied to industrial fisheries throughout the northern hemisphere. In this period, ICES played a central role by contributing foundational concepts and developing conventional methods for stock assessment. In the late 1900s, trends in assessment methods diverged among regions because of differences in fisheries, available data, exploitation histories, management systems, cultural factors, and previously applied methods in each region. Monitoring programs were established for many commercial fisheries in the North Atlantic by the mid-1900s, including collection of fishery statistics, port samples of size and age composition, and fishery-independent surveys, which supported development and application of virtual population analysis (VPA) with yield-per-recruit reference points. In contrast to early deterministic models, integrated statistical models were developed in the 1980s for fisheries in the Pacific and southern hemisphere, many of which had insufficient data to support VPA approaches. The general differences in assessment methods between the North Atlantic and other regions persisted for decades, despite the exchange of ideas and people. In the 21st century, with broader inter-regional collaborations and the evolution of management systems, integrated statistical models were more commonly adopted as best practice for stock assessment throughout the world, primarily for their statistical advantages and flexibility to represent a wide range of fisheries and the available data. The history of stock assessment offers lessons for promoting the communication of advancements and application of appropriate methods for meeting the needs of fishery management.