WGDEEP met at ICES Headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark on 20–27 April 2016. The group was chaired by Pascal Lorance from France and Gudmundur Thordarson from Iceland. Terms of Reference of the Working Group are given in Section 2.

WGDEEP gives advice according to an advice schedule where, in short, half of the stocks advice is given in year y and the other half has advice in year y+1. The exception from this schedule is stocks from ICES Division 5.a (Iceland) that have advice annually. Available time-series for international landings and discards, fishing effort, survey in-dices and biological information were updated and for all stocks and are presented in Sections 4 to 15 of the report.

In response to a request from the NEAFC, the working group update descriptions of deep-water fisheries in the NEAFC and ICES areas by compiling data on catch/land-ings, fishing effort and known spawning areas and areas of local depletion at the finest spatial resolution possible by ICES Subarea and division (Chapter 16).