Local knowledge assessment for a small-scale fishery using geographic information systems

Abstract

This paper uses a recent protocol for the collection of local knowledge of harvesters within a small-scale fishery and applies it to the spiny lobster and queen conch fisheries in the Turks and Caicos Islands. The protocol is used to identify marine harvest locations using hard copy mapping and geographic information systems (GIS) as reference media. Fishing areas are transferred from hard copy to digital form and input into a multi-harvester, multi-layer GIS database, which is used to produce a fishing likelihood surface. This surface is then used to identify high-pressure harvest zones for the spiny lobster. The paper considers the implications of this approach for species co-management, where scientific knowledge derived from traditional fisheries data collection and analysis and local knowledge, as reflected by harvester activities and other harvester-derived data on the fisheries, are combined. Collaboration between government officers, fisheries scientists and local resource harvesters is considered to be potentially the most fruitful avenue for species management through the construction and implementation of a management plan that all parties have contributed to and understand.