Knowledge support for the management of small-scale, spatially-structured fisheries

A. M. PARMA; J.M. ORENSANZ

Merida, México

Conferencia; COASTFISH 2004: First International Conference on Coastal Fisheries in Latin America and the Caribbean: Assessing, Managing and Balancing Actions; 2004

CINVESTAV

The Precautionary Approach has been widely endorsed as a way to make fisheries management decisions in the face of uncertainty. The implementation of this approach has emphasized the typical offshore industrial fishery, assessed by conventional statistical models based on the analysis of historical trends in catch, effort, age composition and abundance indices. The spatial complexity of many coastal fisheries, especially those that target spatially-structured resources associated with the seabed (S-fisheries for short),hinders the use of such conventional approaches to assess stock status and to set fishing targets and catch quotas accordingly. Assessment methods typically ignore the spatial distribution of the resource and the exploitation pattern, which is critical for the interpretation of the data in sedentary stocks. Furthermore, they heavily depend on having reliable estimates of trends of overall stock abundance, which are rarely available for S-fisheries. New, more flexible approaches are needed to provide technical support for the management of S-fisheries. These approaches need to (i) integrate scientific data and available empirical knowledge into the assessment and decision-making process, (ii) contemplate explicitly the multiplicity of spatial scales that are relevant to the understanding and modeling of the dynamics of the resources and the fishing process, (iii) emphasize the need for feedback about stock responses and (iv) evaluate candidate harvesting strategies simultaneously with the monitoring schemes needed to implement them. Examples from different S-fisheries will be used to illustrate possible approaches and analytical tools.