FishPath: Elicits Attributes, Enables Practitioners, and Highlights Harvest Strategy Challenges

DOWLING, NATALIE A.; DOUGHERTY, DAWN; BELL, RICHARD J.; CHICK, ROWAN; COPE, JASON M.; FOWLER, ASHLEY; LOMONICO, SERENA; SNOUFFER, BRIAN; PARMA, A.M.; REVENGA, CARMEN

Seattle

Congreso; 9th World Fisheries Congress; 2024

Americn Fisheries Society

The FishPath Tool provides decision-support to guide the identification of suitable harvest strategycomponent options (data collection, stock assessment, management measure), using a diagnosticquestionnaire that elicits the key characteristics and unique circumstances of a fishery. It comparesthese with the requirements of a broad range of options from an inventory of possible harveststrategy components, identifies where these are met and provides customised, transparent guidance on the appropriateness of each option, specific to the fishery of interest. In recommending options, it explicitly considers which management, governance and socio-economic, as well as life-history and fishery operational attributes will particularly enable, or be a barrier to, specific forms of data collection, stock assessments and management measures. By doing so, it is an enabler to facilitating a way forward for harvest strategy development and management, particularly in data- and capacity-limited fishery contexts. The interactive Tool is impartial, efficient, comprehensive, and evolving, allowing users to navigate what can seem a vast universe of harvest strategy component options. At the same time, the use of FishPath also highlights broader political, cultural, institutional and governance challenges to meeting fishery objectives: even with the most pragmatic and viable harvest strategy, its implementation will not succeed without appropriate stakeholder engagement and buy-in, and institutional and political will and capacity. We provide an overview of both the FishPath Tool and discuss the attributes that still present a barrier to the implementation of harvest strategies that achieve fishery objectives.