Abstract
Coastal fisheries are a critical component of Pacific island food systems; they power village economies and provide nutritious aquatic foods. Many coastal women and men actively fishing in this region rely on multi-species fisheries, which given their extraordinary diversity are notoriously difficult to both characterize, and to manage. Understanding patterns of fishing, diversity of target species and drivers of these patterns can help define requirements for sustainable management and enhanced livelihoods. Here we use a 12-month data set of 8535 fishing trips undertaken by fishers across Malaita province, Solomon Islands, to create fisheries signatures for 13 communities based on the combination of two metrics; catch per unit effort (CPUE) and catch trophic levels. These signatures are in turn used as a framework for guiding suitable management recommendations in the context of community-based resource management. While a key proximate driver of these patterns was fishing gear (e.g. angling, nets or spearguns), market surveys and qualitative environmental information suggest that community fishing characteristics are coupled to local environmental features more than the market value of specific species they target. Our results demonstrate that even within a single island not all small-scale fisheries are equal, and effective management solutions ultimately depend on catering to the specific environmental characteristics around individual communities.
Highlights
The Coral Triangle is globally recognized for the exceptional biodiversity and socioeconomic value of its marine environment (e.g. Coral Triangle Initiative Secretariat 2009; Cohen and Steenbergen 2015)
The volume, species, and value in Solomon Island Dollars (SID) of 100 042 fishes from 400 species, belonging to 47 fish families, were recorded to characterize the quantities and types of fish that pass through the Auki market to support management by the Malaita Provincial Fisheries Office
Our results show that even across a single province, patterns of fishing and catch are highly diverse, with many species being caught across different trophic levels with various levels of efficiency
Summary
The Coral Triangle is globally recognized for the exceptional biodiversity and socioeconomic value of its marine environment (e.g. Coral Triangle Initiative Secretariat 2009; Cohen and Steenbergen 2015). Patterns of resource use and fishing effort are often unknown, which makes it difficult to provide details about the form and function of management (Costello et al 2012; Pitcher and Cheung 2013) In the second, these problems are compounded by the high diversity of tropical fisheries, where captured species have vastly different life-history characteristics (McClanahan et al 2015). The high diversity of tropical ecosystems creates key challenges in understanding patterns of fishing and their implications for sustainability, since catch statistics may differ across hundreds of species as well as between gear types (Humphries et al 2019). We use patterns of catch efficiency and trophic composition to generate specific ‘‘signatures’’ that characterize coastal fisheries across Malaita province, Solomon Islands. We discuss how the diversity of fishing present within this multi-species fishery highlight the need for specific CBRM recommendations that are tailored for individual communities, and use the fishery signatures to provide a framework in which to do so
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