Age sampling
+Summary
+Due to short staffing issues for the age-and-growth program, the number of ages that can be determined for the EBS shelf survey has declined.
+The following presents a simple approach to evaluate the relative impact on proportions at age as a function of reductions from historical samples compared with the full set.
For the fishery data, similar implications are considered for the age compositions.
+Survey
+We downloaded the specimen file from survey data (downloaded for EBS shelf survey data from AKFIN answers). Note that the data on AKFIN only were available through 2022. These were then converted to a data frame for analysis.
+The total samples over time, including those age-1 are shown in Figure 1. We then show the number of samples over time in Figure 2 by age.
+Resampling evaluations
+We resampled the available historical data to evaluate the impact of reduced samples on the age composition.
+We sampled at different levels from 0.25, 0.5,…, 0.9 and examined the plots (Figure 3). For display we examined the distributions of the computed proportions by age under these levels of reductions.
These plots were also created for some of the younger ages (Figure 4).
+Initial conclusions
+In answer to the response of whether the age composition is impacted by the reduced samples, the answer is yes. A reduction in the number of samples to about 60% of historical sampling levels should be acceptable for assessment purposes. However, we caution that any refinement in the spatio-temporal stratification of the survey for age compositions would suffer higher levels of uncertainty.
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