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Artisanal fish fences pose broad and unexpected threats to the tropical coastal seascape.


ABSTRACT: Gear restrictions are an important management tool in small-scale tropical fisheries, improving sustainability and building resilience to climate change. Yet to identify the management challenges and complete footprint of individual gears, a broader systems approach is required that integrates ecological, economic and social sciences. Here we apply this approach to artisanal fish fences, intensively used across three oceans, to identify a previously underrecognized gear requiring urgent management attention. A longitudinal case study shows increased effort matched with large declines in catch success and corresponding reef fish abundance. We find fish fences to disrupt vital ecological connectivity, exploit?>?500 species with high juvenile removal, and directly damage seagrass ecosystems with cascading impacts on connected coral reefs and mangroves. As semi-permanent structures in otherwise open-access fisheries, they create social conflict by assuming unofficial and unregulated property rights, while their unique high-investment-low-effort nature removes traditional economic and social barriers to overfishing.

SUBMITTER: Exton DA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6529422 | biostudies-literature | 2019 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Artisanal fish fences pose broad and unexpected threats to the tropical coastal seascape.

Exton Dan A DA   Ahmadia Gabby N GN   Cullen-Unsworth Leanne C LC   Jompa Jamaluddin J   May Duncan D   Rice Joel J   Simonin Paul W PW   Unsworth Richard K F RKF   Smith David J DJ  

Nature communications 20190521 1


Gear restrictions are an important management tool in small-scale tropical fisheries, improving sustainability and building resilience to climate change. Yet to identify the management challenges and complete footprint of individual gears, a broader systems approach is required that integrates ecological, economic and social sciences. Here we apply this approach to artisanal fish fences, intensively used across three oceans, to identify a previously underrecognized gear requiring urgent manageme  ...[more]

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