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Estimating Age Composition For Multiple Years When There Are Gaps In The Ageing Data: The Case Of Western Atlantic Bluefin Tuna, Lisa E. Ailloud, Matthew V. Lauretta, John F. Walter Iii, John M. Hoenig

VIMS Articles

Age–length key (ALK) methods generally perform well when length samples and age samples are representative of the underlying population. It is unclear how well these methods perform when lengths are representative but age samples are sparse (i.e. age samples are small or missing in many years, and some length groups do not have any age observations). With western Atlantic bluefin tuna, the available age data are sparse and have been, for the most part, collected opportunistically. We evaluated two methods capable of accommodating sparse age data: a novel hybrid ALK (combining forward ALKs and cohort slicing) and the combined forward-inverse …