Traditionally, the contribution, role and importance of small-scale fisheries have often been described in thematic terms such as economic, social, employment and source of food. However, the contributions of small-scale fisheries are often interlinked and interdependent and some of their major contributions lie at the interface between these themes/sectors rather than within each. Also some of...

—Many aspects of small-scale fisheries hinder our efforts to understand their dynamics, as required for sustainable management. For example, there is no widely accepted definition of small-scale fisheries or global data on number of small-scale fishers and their catches. One reason for this is that most research on small-scale fisheries is done at community level and tends to focus on immediate...

Debtanu Barman1*, Phanna Nen2, Sagar C Mandal3 and Vikash Kumar4 1Center for Aquaculture Research and Development (CARD), St. Xavier’s Vocational Training Center, Don Bosco, Bishramganj, Tripura, India 2Fishery Officer, Freshwater Aquaculture research & Development Center, Cambodia 3College of Fisheries, Central Agricultural University, Lembucherra, Tripura, India 4Central Institute of Fisherie...

Recent reports suggest that many well-assessed fisheries in developed countries are moving toward sustainability. We examined whether the same conclusion holds for fisheries lacking formal assessment, which comprise >80% of global catch. We developed a method using species' life-history, catch, and fishery development data to estimate the status of thousands of unassessed fisheries worldwide. W...

Intensive fishing can strongly impact marine ecosystems; among other things, it usually causes the mean trophic level of the catches to decline, an indicator of the occurrence of the 'fishing down' (FD) phenomenon. Although FD occurs throughout the world oceans, it can easily be masked by diverse factors, which has misled authors as to its generality. In this contribution, which uses the East C...

The pattern of the use of the Sepetiba Bay, a semi-closed 450 km(2) area in southeastern Brazil, by Anchoa tricolor was investigated to assess spawning period, recruitment and to detect spatial-temporal patterns of this major fishery resource. Fishes were sampled by seine nets, from spring, 1998 to winter, 1999 and by beach seine, from spring, 1998 to winter, 2000. Reproductive season, measured...