How can accurate landing stats help in designing better fisheries and environmental management for western atlantic estuaries?

Abstract

Fisheries in Brazil, the country with most territory in South America, is not comprehensive at all. The lack of precise historical data is the main concern faced by perspectives of fishery management. The majority of data are simplistic records of extrapolated biomass published by federal entities regardless the habitat from where fish resources were harvested, how they were captured and lengths of capture. Little attention was given to the social, economic and cultural aspects of traditional communities and their livelihood. Worst is the case of estuarine systems of the Western Atlantic, where artisanal fishery rules the landings and the absence of proper monitoring, control and surveillance leads to poor managerial actions. As a result, fishery studies conclude that most fish stocks of Western Atlantic estuaries show signs of over-exploitation. Palliative measures such as closed periods for capture of common resources has emerged as urgent option aiming to reduce the impacts of overfishing. Bycatch reduction devices are examples of emerging options. Fishery management of Brazilian estuaries urges accelerated actions: introduce rights and duties-based fishery management to guarantee the declaration of every fisherman activities; enable fishers to organize themselves through the idea of ecological sustainability and economic efficiency; and acquiring daily reports of fish landings through stakeholder approach and co-management. Fishery pressure is not the unique responsible for reduced estuarine production. Bycatch due to small-mesh nets, oxygen-consuming effluents, emerging pollutants, solid wastes, deforestation of mangrove forest for human purposes and human-driven changes in river flow and estuarine morphology are rapidly changing the nature of a nursery environment. Co-management, long-term data and daily reports on production can help to design stock assessment models, understand variations in biomass over time, detect problems of uncontrolled fishing effort, point periods of seasonal habits for each fishery resource, and, most importantly, guarantee that enough juveniles of each living resource can be recruited to adult stocks. The compliance of ecological data and biological research, robust data for landing stats and the social profile of the fishery community seems to be the ideal approach to build proper rules of co-management in Western Atlantic estuaries.