Abstract
Inland fisheries and their freshwater habitats face intensifying effects from multiple natural and anthropogenic pressures. Fish harvest and biodiversity data remain largely disparate and severely deficient in many areas, which makes assessing and managing inland fisheries difficult. Expert knowledge is increasingly used to improve and inform biological or vulnerability assessments, especially in data-poor areas. Integrating expert knowledge on the distribution, intensity, and relative influence of human activities can guide natural resource management strategies and institutional resource allocation and prioritization. This paper introduces a dataset summarizing the expert-perceived state of inland fisheries at the basin (fishery) level. An electronic survey distributed to professional networks (June-September 2020) captured expert perceptions (n = 536) of threats, successes, and adaptive capacity to fisheries across 93 hydrological basins, 79 countries, and all major freshwater habitat types. This dataset can be used to address research questions with conservation relevance, including: demographic influences on perceptions of threat, adaptive capacities for climate change, external factors driving multi-stressor interactions, and geospatial threat assessments.
Highlights
Background & SummaryFreshwater fish are important contributors to human livelihoods, food and nutrition, recreation, ecosystem services, and biological diversity
In the case of inland fisheries, these data inputs are severely deficient and often disparate in many regions[12,13], which challenges the development of a global assessment
Evaluating stressors and their impacts on inland fisheries necessitates the use of additional data sources beyond those typically derived directly from fish or fish habitats[12,14]
Summary
Freshwater fish are important contributors to human livelihoods, food and nutrition, recreation, ecosystem services, and biological diversity. We designed survey questions to understand the social adaptive capacity of fishers using five major community-level domains: fisher access to assets (e.g., financial, technological, service), fisher and institutional flexibility to adapt to changing conditions (e.g., livelihood alternatives, adaptive management), social capital and organization to enable cooperation and collective action (e.g., co-management), learning and problem-solving for responding to threats, and fishers’ sense of agency to influence and shape actions and outcomes[21] This dataset can be useful as an overview assessment, on which future assessments may expand for specific temporal or spatial interests. Potential uses include demographic influences on threat perceptions, spatial distribution of adaptive capacity measures paired with climate change or other threats, external factors driving multi-stressor interactions, and paired geospatial and expert-derived threat analysis These data can provide insights on fisheries as a coupled human-natural system and inform regional and global freshwater assessments
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