Temporally-lagged North Pacific Gyre Oscillation index improved prediction of recruitment and population status of Pacific saury

We tested the usefulness of temporally-lagged North Pacific Gyre Oscillation (NPGO) indices for future prediction of Pacific saury recruitment and population dynamics by including them into the stock recruitment relationship of previously developed state-space stock assessment model (SAM). Among many annual NPGO indices with different lags, 12 months lagged time series increased the goodness-of-fit of the model the best. With this time series, SAM showed a better hindcasting performance relative to the one without any environmental information.