Trial Specifications Document
Indian Ocean Albacore MSE
1 Introduction
This Trial Specifications Document (TSD) describes the design and technical details of the Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE) of Indian Ocean albacore tuna (Thunnus alalunga), including the operating models, candidate management procedures, and performance metrics used to evaluate them.
The TSD is a living document that will be updated as the MSE progresses to reflect the current state of the analysis.
For more information on the Indian Ocean Albacore MSE process see the project homepage.
1.1 Background
Indian Ocean albacore tuna is managed by the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC). MSE is being used as a tool to support harvest strategy development for this stock, providing a structured framework for testing candidate management procedures against a range of plausible representations of stock and fishery dynamics before adoption of a management procedure.
The initial development of the MSE framework, including the design and conditioning of the Base Case and Robustness Operating Models (OMs) and exploratory runs of candidate management procedures, was conducted by R. Hillary (CSIRO, Australia) and I. Mosqueira (Wageningen Marine Research, Netherlands) (Hillary & Mosqueira, 2024; Mosqueira & Hillary, 2025a, 2025b, 2026).
In 2026, Blue Matter Science was contracted to continue work on the Albacore MSE. The MSE builds directly on the OM conditioning outputs and the candidate management procedures of the earlier phase of work.
1.2 About the Albacore MSE
The Indian Ocean Albacore MSE is built and maintained by Blue Matter Science using the openMSE framework.
The analysis is fully reproducible: all code, functions, and objects used to build the operating models, candidate management procedures, and performance metrics are available in the iotcALB R package. To reproduce the analysis, download the GitHub repository and work through the scripts in the analysis directory.