icesAdviceSheet

Draft ICES advice sheets, as Word documents, for any stock published in the ICES Stock Assessment Graphs (SAG) database. For a stock and assessment year it pulls:

• the stock description, ecoregion, data category and expert group from the Stock Information Database (SID);
• assessment results with confidence bounds, and reference points, from SAG;
• the stock's advice assessments in SAG for the four previous years, for the historical assessment plots;
• the advice, catch scenarios, notes and advice history from the Advice and Scenarios Database (ASD);

and renders a draft in the ICES advice template, with the ICES standard graphs and tables.

The draft marks what it could not fill in:

• [Pending: ...]: data missing or inconsistent in SID, SAG or ASD (for example no F age range in SAG). Fix it at source and re-run.
• [To be supplied ...]: text for the expert group to write (quality of the assessment, technical basis of reference points, and so on).

Installation

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("ices-tools-dev/icesAdviceSheet",
  repos = c("https://ices-tools-prod.r-universe.dev", "https://cloud.r-project.org"))

The ICES packages (icesSD, icesSAG, icesASD) are installed from the ICES r-universe. Rendering also needs the Quarto command-line tool (version 1.4 or later); RStudio includes it.

Usage

library(icesAdviceSheet)

# Download the data and render the draft
draft <- run_advice("sol.27.7d", 2026)
#> output/sol.27.7d_2026_advice_draft.docx

# What the draft still needs
advice_todo(draft)

Several stocks:

stocks <- c("sol.27.7d", "bli.27.5a14", "her.27.5a")
drafts <- lapply(stocks, function(s) {
  tryCatch(run_advice(s, 2026), error = function(e) {
    message(s, " FAILED: ", conditionMessage(e))
    NULL
  })
})
advice_todo(unlist(drafts))

run_advice() is get_stock_data() followed by render_advice(). The data are saved in data/, so a draft can be re-rendered without downloading again:

render_advice("sol.27.7d", 2026)

To check the downloaded fields for a stock:

x <- readRDS("data/sol.27.7d_2026.rds")
inspect_stock_data(x)

Checks

get_stock_data() stops with a message, rather than guessing, when:

• SID, SAG or ASD return no record, or more than one, for the stock and year;
• SID and ASD point to different SAG assessments;
• SAG has more than one row per year.

The draft also flags, as [Pending: ...], missing SAG fields (F age range, stock size units), ASD advice said to apply before its release date, and years left out of the historical assessment plots because SAG has more than one advice assessment for them.

Word compatibility

Quarto writes figure and table captions in a way Word reports as "unreadable content". render_advice() repairs every draft with fix_caption_paragraphs(), which can also be used on other Quarto Word output.

Data sources

• SID: https://sd.ices.dk (icesSD)
• SAG: https://sag.ices.dk (icesSAG)
• ASD: https://asd.ices.dk (icesASD)