The resist-accept-direct (RAD) framework for climate adaptation is a useful tool, particularly when conservation practitioners know they need to address climate change but do not know where to start or when they struggle to implement conservation actions that are outside the status quo. Some conservation practitioners may view RAD as a decision process that will lead them through selecting climate adaptation actions to meet their objectives; however, RAD may be better suited for use with existing decision processes. RAD can improve adaptation planning processes by helping conservation practitioners examine a broader portfolio of climate adaptation actions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInland recreational fishing is primarily considered a leisure-driven activity in freshwaters, yet its harvest can contribute to food systems. Here we estimate that the harvest from inland recreational fishing equates to just over one-tenth of all reported inland fisheries catch globally. The estimated total consumptive use value of inland recreational fish destined for human consumption may reach US$9.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLancet Planet Health
January 2024
The United States Inland Creel and Angler Survey Catalog (CreelCat) contains a national compilation of angler and creel survey data collected by natural resource management agencies across the United States (including Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: The global COVID-19 pandemic resulted in many jurisdictions implementing orders restricting the movements of people to inhibit virus transmission, with recreational angling often either not permitted or access to fisheries and/or related infrastructure being prevented. Following the lifting of restrictions, initial angler surveys and licence sales suggested increased participation and effort, and altered angler demographics, but with evidence remaining limited. Here, we overcome this evidence gap by identifying temporal changes in angling interest, licence sales, and angling effort in world regions by comparing data in the 'pre-pandemic' (up to and including 2019); 'acute pandemic' (2020) and 'COVID-acclimated' (2021) periods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA common goal among fisheries science professionals, stakeholders, and rights holders is to ensure the persistence and resilience of vibrant fish populations and sustainable, equitable fisheries in diverse aquatic ecosystems, from small headwater streams to offshore pelagic waters. Achieving this goal requires a complex intersection of science and management, and a recognition of the interconnections among people, place, and fish that govern these tightly coupled socioecological and sociotechnical systems. The World Fisheries Congress (WFC) convenes every four years and provides a unique global forum to debate and discuss threats, issues, and opportunities facing fish populations and fisheries.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Among the most widely predicted climate change-related impacts to biodiversity are geographic range shifts, whereby species shift their spatial distribution to track their climate niches. A series of commonly articulated hypotheses have emerged in the scientific literature suggesting species are expected to shift their distributions to higher latitudes, greater elevations, and deeper depths in response to rising temperatures associated with climate change. Yet, many species are not demonstrating range shifts consistent with these expectations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHeterogeneity is a central feature of ecosystem resilience, but how this translates to socioeconomic resilience depends on people's ability to track shifting resources in space and time. Here, we quantify how climatic extremes have influenced how people (fishers) track economically valuable ecosystem services (fishing opportunities) across a range of spatial scales in rivers of the northern Rocky Mountains, USA, over the past three decades. Fishers opportunistically shifted from drought-sensitive to drought-resistant rivers during periods of low streamflows and warm temperatures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInland recreational fisheries, found in lakes, rivers, and other landlocked waters, are important to livelihoods, nutrition, leisure, and other societal ecosystem services worldwide. Although recreationally-caught fish are frequently harvested and consumed by fishers, their contribution to food and nutrition has not been adequately quantified due to lack of data, poor monitoring, and under-reporting, especially in developing countries. Beyond limited global harvest estimates, few have explored species-specific harvest patterns, although this variability has implications for fisheries management and food security.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNature
October 2021
Despite contributing to healthy diets for billions of people, aquatic foods are often undervalued as a nutritional solution because their diversity is often reduced to the protein and energy value of a single food type ('seafood' or 'fish'). Here we create a cohesive model that unites terrestrial foods with nearly 3,000 taxa of aquatic foods to understand the future impact of aquatic foods on human nutrition. We project two plausible futures to 2030: a baseline scenario with moderate growth in aquatic animal-source food (AASF) production, and a high-production scenario with a 15-million-tonne increased supply of AASFs over the business-as-usual scenario in 2030, driven largely by investment and innovation in aquaculture production.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecreational angling in the United States (US) is largely a personal hobby that scales up to a multibillion-dollar economic activity. Given dramatic changes to personal decisions and behaviors resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, we surveyed recreational anglers across the US to understand how the pandemic may have affected their fishing motivations and subsequent activities. Nearly a quarter million anglers from 10 US states were invited to participate in the survey, and almost 18,000 responded.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInland 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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPolicies that mandate environmental flows (e-flows) can be powerful tools for freshwater conservation, but implementation of these policies faces many hurdles. To better understand these challenges, we explored two key questions: (1) What additional data are needed to implement e-flows? and (2) What are the major socio-political barriers to implementing e-flows? We surveyed water and natural resource decision makers in the semi-arid Red River basin, Texas-Oklahoma, USA, and used social network analysis to analyze their communication patterns. Most respondents agreed that e-flows can provide important benefits and identified the same data needs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic has led to environmental recovery in some ecosystems from a global "anthropause," yet such evidence for natural resources with extraction or production value (e.g., fisheries) is limited.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGlobally, our knowledge on lake fisheries is still limited despite their importance to food security and livelihoods. Here we show that fish catches can respond either positively or negatively to climate and land-use changes, by analyzing time-series data (1970-2014) for 31 lakes across five continents. We find that effects of a climate or land-use driver (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInland fishes provide important ecosystem services to communities worldwide and are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Fish respond to climate change in diverse and nuanced ways, which creates challenges for practitioners of fish conservation, climate change adaptation, and management. Although climate change is known to affect fish globally, a comprehensive online, public database of how climate change has impacted inland fishes worldwide and adaptation or management practices that may address these impacts does not exist.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present the first high resolution (1:20,000) river centerlines shapefiles from 50 large rivers across the world. Rivers were selected based on the criteria of having more than 1000 km length and which have been reported to have a significant contribution to global fishery production. Since large rivers often span multiple countries, the degree of changes (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Environ Manage
October 2016
Approaches to managing inland fisheries vary between systems and regions but are often based on large-scale marine fisheries principles and thus limited and outdated. Rarely do they adopt holistic approaches that consider the complex interplay among humans, fish, and the environment. We argue that there is an urgent need for a shift in inland fisheries management towards holistic and transdisciplinary approaches that embrace the principles of social-ecological systems at the watershed scale.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAt present, inland fisheries are not often a national or regional governance priority and as a result, inland capture fisheries are undervalued and largely overlooked. As such they are threatened in both developing and developed countries. Indeed, due to lack of reliable data, inland fisheries have never been part of any high profile global fisheries assessment and are notably absent from the Sustainable Development Goals.
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