The Scientific Committee considered that one potential approach to defining a fishery as lapsed is to consider the time period since the last commercial fishing activity, and the level of information about the current status of the resource. For some fisheries, this information level is proportional to the time since commercial fishing last took place. For others, there are non-commercial sources of information, such as research surveys. In all cases, the rate at which information becomes less relevant depends partly on the biology of the species in question, and in particular on the rate of turnover of the stock. Such stock-specific characteristics emphasise the merit of deciding on a case-by-case basis whether a fishery has lapsed.