14
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: not found
      • Article: not found

      Why have global shark and ray landings declined: improved management or overfishing?

      , ,
      Fish and Fisheries
      Wiley-Blackwell

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisher
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Related collections

          Most cited references36

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: not found

          Leadership, social capital and incentives promote successful fisheries.

          One billion people depend on seafood as their primary source of protein and 25% of the world's total animal protein comes from fisheries. Yet a third of fish stocks worldwide are overexploited or depleted. Using individual case studies, many have argued that community-based co-management should prevent the tragedy of the commons because cooperative management by fishers, managers and scientists often results in sustainable fisheries. However, general and multidisciplinary evaluations of co-management regimes and the conditions for social, economic and ecological success within such regimes are lacking. Here we examine 130 co-managed fisheries in a wide range of countries with different degrees of development, ecosystems, fishing sectors and type of resources. We identified strong leadership as the most important attribute contributing to success, followed by individual or community quotas, social cohesion and protected areas. Less important conditions included enforcement mechanisms, long-term management policies and life history of the resources. Fisheries were most successful when at least eight co-management attributes were present, showing a strong positive relationship between the number of these attributes and success, owing to redundancy in management regulations. Our results demonstrate the critical importance of prominent community leaders and robust social capital, combined with clear incentives through catch shares and conservation benefits derived from protected areas, for successfully managing aquatic resources and securing the livelihoods of communities depending on them. Our study offers hope that co-management, the only realistic solution for the majority of the world's fisheries, can solve many of the problems facing global fisheries.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: not found

            Status and solutions for the world's unassessed fisheries.

            Recent reports suggest that many well-assessed fisheries in developed countries are moving toward sustainability. We examined whether the same conclusion holds for fisheries lacking formal assessment, which comprise >80% of global catch. We developed a method using species' life-history, catch, and fishery development data to estimate the status of thousands of unassessed fisheries worldwide. We found that small unassessed fisheries are in substantially worse condition than assessed fisheries, but that large unassessed fisheries may be performing nearly as well as their assessed counterparts. Both small and large stocks, however, continue to decline; 64% of unassessed stocks could provide increased sustainable harvest if rebuilt. Our results suggest that global fishery recovery would simultaneously create increases in abundance (56%) and fishery yields (8 to 40%).
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Global estimates of shark catches using trade records from commercial markets.

              Despite growing concerns about overexploitation of sharks, lack of accurate, species-specific harvest data often hampers quantitative stock assessment. In such cases, trade studies can provide insights into exploitation unavailable from traditional monitoring. We applied Bayesian statistical methods to trade data in combination with genetic identification to estimate by species, the annual number of globally traded shark fins, the most commercially valuable product from a group of species often unrecorded in harvest statistics. Our results provide the first fishery-independent estimate of the scale of shark catches worldwide and indicate that shark biomass in the fin trade is three to four times higher than shark catch figures reported in the only global data base. Comparison of our estimates to approximated stock assessment reference points for one of the most commonly traded species, blue shark, suggests that current trade volumes in numbers of sharks are close to or possibly exceeding the maximum sustainable yield levels.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Journal
                Fish and Fisheries
                Fish Fish
                Wiley-Blackwell
                14672960
                June 2016
                June 2016
                : 17
                : 2
                : 438-458
                Article
                10.1111/faf.12119
                a5805f49-94cc-4d5d-9c8b-887c080f29a1
                © 2016

                http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/tdm_license_1

                History

                Comments

                Comment on this article