Declining fisheries catches are a global trend, with management failing to keep pace with growth in fishing effort and technological advances. The economic value of Honduras’ catches was estimated ...within the industrial and artisanal sectors. Catches were found to be 2.9 times greater than the official statistics between 1950 and 2015. The merging of industrial and artisanal catch data masked the decline in industrial catches and hid the strong growth of artisanal fisheries. In 1996, annual artisanal fisheries landed catches surpassed the industrial fishery sector, and in 2000, the annual net value of artisanal fisheries eclipsed the value of the industrial fisheries. These data highlight the importance of artisanal fisheries in Honduras and challenge the long‐held belief that the industrial sector contributes more to the national economy. The global paucity of fisheries data highlights the need for comprehensive strategies to collect more detailed and accurate fisheries data.
A growing push to implement catch share fishery programs is based partly on the recognition that they may provide stronger incentives for ecological stewardship than conventional fisheries ...management. Using data on population status, quota compliance, discard rates, use of habitat-damaging gear, and landings for 15 catch share programs in North America, I tested the hypothesis that catch share systems lead to improved ecological stewardship and status of exploited populations. Impacts of catch share programs were measured through comparisons of fisheries with catch shares to fisheries without catch shares or by comparing fisheries before and after catch shares were implemented. The average levels of most indicators were unaffected by catch share implementation: only discard rate, which declined significantly in catch share fisheries, showed a significant response. However, catch share fisheries were distinguished by markedly reduced interannual variability in all indicators, being statistically significant for exploitation rate, landings, discard rate, and the ratio of catch to catch quotas. These impacts of catch shares were common between nations and ocean basins and were independent of the number of years that catch share programs had been in place. These findings suggest that for the indicators examined, the primary effect of catch shares was greater consistency over time. This enhanced consistency could be beneficial to fishery systems and might also be an indication of more effective management.
Through the ethnography and history of fish production, seafood consumption, state modernizing policies and marine science, this book analyzes the role of local knowledge in the management of marine ...resources on the Eastern Black Sea coast of Turkey. Fishing, science and other ways of knowing and relating to fish and the sea are analyzed as particular ways of life conditioned by history, ideology and daily practice. The approach adopted here allows for a broader analysis of the role knowledge plays in the management of common pool resources (CPR) than is provided in much of the contemporary CPR debate that tends to have a somewhat narrow focus on institutions and rules. By contrast, the author argues that also local knowledge and the larger historical and ideological context of production, as manifest in state modernization policies and consumption patterns, should be taken into account when trying to explain the current management regime in Turkish Black Sea fisheries.
Everything revolves around the herring Gauvreau, Alisha M.; Lepofsky, Dana; Rutherford, Murray ...
Ecology and society,
06/2017, Volume:
22, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) is foundational to many social-ecological systems of the North American coast. The indigenous people of Heiltsuk First Nation on the central coast of British ...Columbia, Canada have depended on this forage fish for food, social, ceremonial, and economic purposes for millennia. Our research documents social, ecological, and cultural aspects of Heiltsuk First Nation’s relationship with Pacific herring and how this relationship has changed over time. We describe and discuss (1) how Heiltsuk social institutions, local and traditional ecological knowledge, and worldview have informed herring management strategies from pre-contact times until present, and (2) how post-contact changes in state-led herring management and other social and institutional developments in British Columbia have affected the role and transmission of Heiltsuk local knowledge and management of herring. By working in close partnership with Heiltsuk decision-makers, and by conducting interviews with Heiltsuk knowledge holders, we ensured that the data gathered would be relevant, applicable, and valuable to the Heiltsuk community. Our research therefore serves as an example of how state fisheries agencies could improve relationships with indigenous communities by engaging in more collaborative data collection, and our results suggest the potential for joint learning and improvement in fisheries management through collaboration during the design of management and harvesting plans. Our research has relevance at the global level because we identify some of the steps that may be taken to help overcome institutionalized inertia and attain more equitable power relationships for sustainable fisheries management.
South Africa is in the process of developing a National Freshwater (Inland) Wild Capture Fisheries Policy. A properly focused research strategy is essential to guide the policy development process, ...and thus a dedicated 'Inland Fisheries' workshop was convened by the South African Society for Aquatic Scientists in June 2018 to update and further develop a list of priority knowledge requirements for inland fisheries in the country. The main themes that emerged during the workshop were developed and contextualised as ten research questions. These were: (1) What is the exploitation potential of inland fisheries? (2) What are the health risks from consuming freshwater fishes? (3) Who currently uses inland fisheries and what are their harvests? (4) What can we learn from historical constraints to inland fisheries development? (5) How will governance of fisheries have to change in an evolving sectoral environment? (6) What are the options for fisheries enhancement? (7) What are the most appropriate fisheries technologies? (8) What value chains and employment opportunities are associated with inland fisheries? (9) What is the impact of water level fluctuations on fish production? (10) What are the impacts of pathogenic diseases on fish populations?
Regulation of fisheries using spatial property rights can alleviate competition for high-value patches that hinders economic efficiency in quota-based, rights-based, and open-access management ...programs. However, efficiency gains erode when delineation of spatial rights constitutes incomplete ownership of the resource, thereby degrading its local value and promoting overexploitation. Incomplete ownership may be particularly prevalent in the spatial management of mobile fishery species. We developed a game-theoretic bioeconomic model of spatial property rights representing territorial user rights fisheries (TURF) management of nearshore marine fish and invertebrate species with mobile adult and larval life history stages. Strategic responses by fisheries in neighboring management units result in overexploitation of the stock and reduced yields for each fishery compared with those attainable without resource mobility or with coordination or sole control in fishing effort. High dispersal potential of the larval stage, a common trait among nearshore fishery species, coupled with scaling of management units to only capture adult mobility, a common characteristic of many nearshore TURF programs, in particular substantially reduced stock levels and yields. In a case study of hypothetical TURF programs of nearshore fish and invertebrate species, management units needed to be tens of kilometers in alongshore length to minimize larval export and generate reasonable returns to fisheries. Cooperation and quota regulations represent solutions to the problem that need to be quantified in cost and integrated into the determination of the acceptability of spatial property rights management of fisheries.
Random utility models have been widely used to model spatial choice within fisheries, but less attention has been paid to modeling participation and movement between fisheries. Fishers may switch ...fisheries in response to time closures or changes in profitability potentially creating management implications for those fisheries, as well as the fishery with the closure. We used a random utility maximization framework to model participation, fishery choice, and location choice for a large fleet of West Coast salmon trollers, many of which also participate in other fisheries. We used the model to demonstrate substitution effects across fisheries due to spatial policies implemented in the salmon fishery. Our work suggests that spatial management of a single fishery needs to take into consideration fishers’ full choice set to predict behavioral responses to spatial policies. Our analysis also provides insights into how fishers construct multifishery harvest strategies that enable them to more fully use capital or adjust to closures or changes in relative profitability.
The MEDITS programme started in 1994 in the Mediterranean with the cooperation among research institutes from four countries: France, Greece, Italy and Spain. Over the years, until the advent of the ...European framework for the collection and management of fisheries data (the Data Collection Framework, DCF), new partners from Slovenia, Croatia, Albania, Montenegro, Malta and Cyprus joined MEDITS. The FAO regional projects facilitated the cooperation with non-European countries. MEDITS applies a common sampling protocol and methodology for sample collection, data storage and data quality checks (RoME routines). For many years, MEDITS represented the most important data source supporting the evaluation of demersal resources by means of population and community indicators, assessment and simulation models based on fishery-independent data. With the consolidation of the DCF, MEDITS routinely provides abundance indices of target species for tuning stock assessment models of intermediate complexity. Over the years, the survey scope has broadened from the population of demersal species to their fish community and ecosystems, and it has faced new challenges, such as the identification of essential fish habitats, providing new scientific insights linked to the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (e.g. biodiversity, trophic webs, allochthonous species and marine macro-litter evaluations) and to the ecosystem approach to fishery and marine spatial planning.
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