The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2012
Box 4 Developing an assessment strategy for inland fishery resources An accurate assessment of inland fishery resources must take into account the numerous aspects and drivers that influence the health of inland aquatic ecosystems and the status of inland fishery resources. Given the multiple uses of freshwater, it is recognized that an assessment of inland fishery resources should be based on more than just the amount of catch and the effort applied. The assessment should determine whether or not the management goals for the fishery or waterbody are being met. In general, the goals of responsible inland fisheries include an environmental component, e.g. production and protection of biodiversity, and a social and economic component, e.g. poverty reduction, income generation, and cultural heritage. Thus, rather than a single dimensional plot of status of exploitation rate, inland fisheries could be plotted on multidimensional axes that examine environmental and production parameters in the light of social and economic parameters. In the accompanying figure, specific inland capture fisheries ( ) are assigned to a given quadrant (A, B, C or D) depending on how they perform according to environmental and production parameters (y-axis) and social and economic parameters (x-axis). Fisheries in quadrant B would be performing well on both environmental/production and social/economic criteria, whereas fisheries in quadrant C would be performing poorly. Individual fisheries could be tracked over time to determine how the state of the fishery was changing and whether changes to management are indicated. For example, a highly productive fishery that provided very little economic value would be placed in quadrant A; a very lucrative recreational fishery that focused on a few high-value species that were stocked from aquaculture facilities would be placed in D.
Conceptual diagram of assessment of the status of inland capture fisheries
Environmental and production index
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A
B
C
D
Social and economic index