The codevelopment of coastal fisheries monitoring methods to support local management

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Small-scale fisheries across the globe provide critical food security, livelihoods, and human well-being, but are threatened by a combination of local and global stressors, including overexploitation, pollution, and climate change. Participatory approaches to management, especially those that incorporate local communities and customary knowledge can provide meaningful biological information that supports sustainable fisheries management and builds local adaptive capacity to changing ocean conditions. Through a collaboration between fishers, scientists, NGOs, and regulating agencies, we developed a low-cost, low-tech method to assess the seasonal spawning peaks, lunar spawning cycles, and size at maturity (L 50 ) for key targeted reef fish, combining traditional knowledge and practice with modern scientific approaches, including gonadosomatic index (GSI) and histology. Two years of community-based monitoring resulted in data from 57 species and 15 families of reef and nearshore fishes (n = 2595), with detailed information for 10 species at 4 locations across the Hawaiian Islands. Comparisons between community-collected GSI data and scientifically (histologically) assessed spawning cycles and size at reproductive maturity produced similar results suggesting that these approaches can be applied in data-poor fisheries to assess spawning seasons and size at maturity (L 50 ), both of which are critical needs for effective fisheries management. Semistructured surveys revealed a large body of local knowledge on spawning times and harvest practices based on allowing spawning to occur before harvesting and protecting small and large size classes, but little evidence that fishers understand temporal patterns of spawning. This suggests that monitoring methods that fill key gaps such as this and are congruent with these local knowledge systems and customary harvest practices may be key for local stewardship and adaptive management.

Threats to Common‐Pool Resources and the Importance of Forums: On the Emergence of Cooperation in CPR Problem Settings

“…The aspect of threat has been assessed in depth in studies on adaptation and resilience. Here, threats are perceived as one major driver for collective action and cooperation among actors (Blythe, Murray, & Flaherty, 2014;Schemmel et al, 2016). Literature on climate change adaptation and resource degradation primarily and deliberately considers natural threats (e.g., climate change effects) in order to scrutinize the vulnerability and adaptability of communities that are exposed to environmental events (Adger, Quinn, Lorenzoni, & Murphy, 2016;Gersonius, van Buuren, Zethof, & Kelder, 2016).…”

Length‐Based Assessment of an Artisanal Albulid Fishery in the South Pacific: a Data‐Limited Approach for Management and Conservation

“…Given the urgent need for management and the failure of many top-down management regimes in Oceania (Johannes 1978(Johannes , 1998Friedlander 2018), we recommend a community-based management approach to implementing these conservation actions based on local participation in the monitoring of the resource (Mcclanahan et al 1997;Wilson et al 2006;Danielsen et al 2007;Jokiel et al 2011;Ayers and Kittinger 2014;Schemmel et al 2016;Vaughan et al 2017). Rahui is the traditional conservation method of Eastern Polynesia in which a community can chose to restrict the use of an area or resource that is in decline and provides a socially robust method of management.…”

Defining the reproductive period of freshwater fish species using the Gonadosomatic Index: a proposed protocol applied to ten species of the Patos Lagoon basin

“…Concerning the proposed protocol to identify reproductive cycles, the use of GSI and numerical threshold values presents some practical advantages for a large dataset in comparison to morphological analysis, as it is less time-consuming than a histological analysis (Schemmel et al, 2016). However, the use of a standard protocol has some weaknesses.…”

“…Although microscopic analysis provides a better understanding of the full reproductive cycle, it is clearly time-consuming and difficult to apply to entire, highly diverse fish communities. Even so, in a recent review, Schemmel et al (2016) compared the evaluation of seasonal spawning peaks of 57 fish species across the Hawaiian Islands by using both communitycollected GSI data and scientifically (histologically) assessed information. Both approaches gave similar results, suggesting that the Gonadosomatic Index (GSI) approach could be applied in data-poor fisheries for which morphological analysis is not possible due to logistic constraints.…”