Abstract
The development of fishing efficiency coupled with an increase of fishing effort led to the overexploitation of numerous natural marine resources. In addition to this commercial pressure, the impact of recreational activities on fish assemblages remains barely known. Here we examined the impact of spearfishing limitation on resources in a marine protected area (MPA) and the benefit it provides for the local artisanal fishery through the use of a novel indicator. We analysed trends in the fish assemblage composition using artisanal fisheries data collected in the Bonifacio Strait Natural Reserve (BSNR), a Mediterranean MPA where the spearfishing activity has been forbidden over 15% of its area. Fish species were pooled into three response groups according to their target level by spearfishing. We developed the new flexible ReGS indicator reflecting shifts in species assemblages according to the relative abundance of each response group facing external pressure. The catch per unit effort (CPUE) increased by ca. 60% in the BSNR between 2000 and 2007, while the MPA was established in 1999. The gain of CPUE strongly depended on the considered response group: for the highly targeted group, the CPUE doubled while the CPUE of the untargeted group increased by only 15.5%. The ReGS value significantly increased from 0.31 to 0.45 (on a scale between 0 and 1) in the general perimeter of this MPA while it has reached a threshold of 0.43, considered as a reference point, in the area protected from spearfishing since 1982. Our results demonstrated that limiting recreational fishing by appropriate zoning in multiple-use MPAs represents a real benefit for artisanal fisheries. More generally we showed how our new indicator may reveal a wide range of impacts on coastal ecosystems such as global change or habitat degradation.
Highlights
The ease of accessibility to coastal marine resources coupled with considerable technical improvements in the professional fishing industry has increased the fishing pressure worldwide
Each fishing operation displayed a mean of 0.38 caught species 50 m21 d21 (SE = 0.013), corresponding to ca. 11 species caught per fishing operation (SE = 0.46), and a mean catch per unit effort (CPUE) of 664.5 g 50 m21 d21 (SE = 40.25 g 50 m21 d21)
CPUE trends between 2000 and 2007 The general trend of the whole assemblage displayed a significant increase of CPUE (Fig. 3a) compared with the ‘‘noeffect’’ model (Table 2)
Summary
The ease of accessibility to coastal marine resources coupled with considerable technical improvements in the professional fishing industry has increased the fishing pressure worldwide. This has led to an unprecedented level of exploitation [1], resulting in the collapse of many marine fish stocks [1,2,3,4,5,6]. In addition to commercial fisheries, there is growing evidence of considerable yields from recreational fishing activities. More generally and at a worldwide scale, measuring the impact of the recreational fishing activities becomes even more critical since they have reached an unprecedented level overall [13,14]
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