- Environmental Science, Human Behavioral Ecology, Conservation Biology, Biodiversity, Ecology, Science Communication, and 9 moreEnvironmental Education, Human-wildlife conflicts, Marine and Fisheries Policy, Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management, Climate Impacts to Fisheries, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Ecosystem Modelling, Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing, and Traditional Fisheriesedit
A biodiversidade aquática e a elevada produtividade pesqueira da Bacia Amazônica se devem principalmente à dinâmica anual dos pulsos de inundação e às extensas áreas alagáveis. Alguns dos principais impactos da construção de barragens... more
A biodiversidade aquática e a elevada produtividade pesqueira da Bacia Amazônica se devem principalmente à dinâmica anual dos pulsos de inundação e às extensas áreas alagáveis. Alguns dos principais impactos da construção de barragens para geração de hidroeletricidade incidem precisamente nesta dinâmica hidrológica. A construção da Usina Hidrelétrica (UHE) Belo Monte interfere na dinâmica hidrológica da Volta Grande do Xingu (VGX) ao desviar a maior parte da vazão para fora desse trecho do rio. Com base em uma análise crítica da literatura sobre o impacto de barragens e de monitoramentos em campo, que vêm sendo conduzidos tanto pelo empreendedor quanto por pesquisas independentes, verificamos que seriam necessários volumes de água substancialmente maiores do que o hidrograma proposto pela empresa e pela Agência Nacional de Águas (ANA), para não causar a total ruptura na conexão do rio com as planícies alagáveis, com efeitos negativos em cascata que comprometem, inclusive, a seguranç...
Many developing countries lack information to manage their endangered species, urging the need for affordable and reliable information. We used Bayesian hierarchical spatial models, with oceanographic variables, to predict the... more
Many developing countries lack information to manage their endangered species, urging the need for affordable and reliable information. We used Bayesian hierarchical spatial models, with oceanographic variables, to predict the distribution range of Epinephelus marginatus, the dusky grouper, for the entire Southwest Atlantic. We ran a model using scientific information gathered from the literature and another using information gathered from fishers on species presence or absence. In both models, temperature was an important determinant of species occurrence. The predicted occurrence of the dusky grouper overlapped widely (Schoener’s D = 0.71; Warren’s I = 0.91) between the models, despite small differences on the southern and northern extremes of the distribution. These results suggest that basic information provided by fishers on species occurrence in their area can be reliable enough to predict species occurrence over large scales and can be potentially useful for marine spatial pl...
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Accessing folk knowledge from small-scale fishers is an affordable and reliable approach to understand the dynamic and diversity of shark species worldwide, especially of those eventually caught. In this context, ethnotaxonomy (folk... more
Accessing folk knowledge from small-scale fishers is an affordable and reliable approach to understand the dynamic and diversity of shark species worldwide, especially of those eventually caught. In this context, ethnotaxonomy (folk identification and classification) may represent an alternative to support sharks fisheries management, especially in data-poor places. This study aimed to investigate fishing and ethnotaxonomy of the main shark species caught by small-scale fisheries from the coastal waters of the Brazilian Northeast. Semi-structured and structured interviews were conducted with fishers targeting general aspects of fishing activities and specific topics regarding ethnotaxonomy, capture, and commercialization of sharks. For species identification, an ethnobiological systematic perspective was used to analyze the folk nomenclature and classification criteria. Non-parametric statistical tests were used to verify associations between species caught, fishing gear, and harves...
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Ecosystems services (ES) provide food and recreation to humans, but are fast being degraded. Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have been proposed as a way to protect some of these ES, but decisions regarding what gets protection and what gets... more
Ecosystems services (ES) provide food and recreation to humans, but are fast being degraded. Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have been proposed as a way to protect some of these ES, but decisions regarding what gets protection and what gets consumed can be a source of conflicts. One such example is the Fernando de Noronha MPA (Brazil), where there is a conflict between shark-directed tourism and fishers who would like to access the no-take part of the MPA during part of the year. A contingent valuation method (Willingness to Pay) was used to ascertain if tourists would accept compensating fishers for not disturbing the sharks during a specific period of the year, by adding a symbolic increase in the taxes they already pay to either visit the island or to visit the no-take part of the MPA. Tourists were open to this alternative (67-71%), regardless of the fee being paid. However, there was a slight tendency to reject the fee when the tourists saw sharks during their stay, suggesting th...
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Identifying vulnerable habitats is necessary to designing and prioritizing efficient marine protected areas (MPAs) to sustain the renewal of living marine resources. However, vulnerable habitats rarely become MPAs due to conflicting... more
Identifying vulnerable habitats is necessary to designing and prioritizing efficient marine protected areas (MPAs) to sustain the renewal of living marine resources. However, vulnerable habitats rarely become MPAs due to conflicting interests such as fishing. We propose a spatial framework to help researchers and managers determine optimal conservation areas in a multi-species fishery, while also considering the economic relevance these species may have in a given society, even in data poor situations. We first set different ecological criteria (i.e. species resilience, vulnerability and trophic level) to identify optimal areas for conservation and restoration efforts, which was based on a traditional conservationist approach. We then identified the most economically relevant sites, where the bulk of fishery profits come from. We overlapped the ecologically and economically relevant areas using different thresholds. By ranking the level of overlap between the sites, representing dif...
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Shrimps are an important and valuable fishing resource, being increasingly exploited worldwide, demanding appropriate management. However, factors such as how shrimps are affected by environmental variables and how such variables are... more
Shrimps are an important and valuable fishing resource, being increasingly exploited worldwide, demanding appropriate management. However, factors such as how shrimps are affected by environmental variables and how such variables are likely to change under a climate change scenario are still poorly known. We used a Brazilian database with 10 years of shrimp catch and effort data, from 20 different small-scale equatorial fishing ports, to test how shrimp fishing productivity is affected by environmental (sea surface temperature (SST), wind, precipitation, and cloudiness), economic (ex-vessel price), spatial (fishing port), and temporal factors (year and month). The results showed that better productivities are reached at higher SST (to a limit 26 °C) and precipitation. Time (year) and space (different fishing villages showed different fishing success) also affected the fishing success. Considering that both temperature and precipitation were important determinants of shrimp productivity, we estimated how such productivity would be affected by climate change. Our results suggest that these fisheries could collapse in a warmer and drier future, which is a possible scenario for the region. Overall, a better understanding of regional shrimp fisheries could permit the development of tailor-made management measures. Besides, this study also shows how an economically important invertebrate stock is sensitive to climate change, which is a warning signal to developing countries, where there is a significant parcel of its population directly dependent on fishery exploitation.
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Small-scale fisheries of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest Coast (BAFC) depend on fish resources for food and income. Thus, if the catch diminishes or if fish species that are a target for fishers are overexploited or impacted, this could... more
Small-scale fisheries of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest Coast (BAFC) depend on fish resources for food and income. Thus, if the catch diminishes or if fish species that are a target for fishers are overexploited or impacted, this could affect fishers' livelihoods. The exclusion of threatened fish species from the catch is believed to be a threat to small-scale fisheries, which is likely to be the case along the BAFC. Many fish species are currently listed as threatened or vulnerable, whereas there is not enough biological information available to determine the status of the majority of the other species. Failure to protect the BAFC biodiversity might negatively impact fishers' income and the regional economy of local small-scale fisheries. We collected data from 1986 to 2009 through 347 interviews and 24-h food recall surveys at seven southeastern coastal sites of the Atlantic Forest. We show that important species of consumed fish are currently threatened: of the 65 species ...
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Acquiring fast and accurate information on ecological patterns of fishery resources is a basic first step for their management. However, some countries may lack the technical and/or the financial means to undergo traditional scientific... more
Acquiring fast and accurate information on ecological patterns of fishery resources is a basic first step for their management. However, some countries may lack the technical and/or the financial means to undergo traditional scientific samplings to get such information; therefore affordable and reliable alternatives need to be sought. We compared two different approaches to identify occurrence patterns and catch for three main fish species caught with bottom-set gillnets used by artisanal fishers from northeast Brazil: (1) scientific on-board record data of small-scale fleet (n = 72 trips), and (2) interviews with small-scale fishers on Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK) (n = 32 interviews). We correlated (Pearson correlations) the months cited by fishers (LEK) as belonging to the rainy or to the dry season with observed periods of higher and lower precipitation (SK). The presence of the three main fish species at different depths was compared between LEK and SK by Spearman correlatio...
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SUMMARY Fishery problems and their management alternatives go beyond the simple scope of fish stock analysis, encompassing the socio-economic and behavioral characteristics of fishermen. A case study is presented in which a fish-oriented... more
SUMMARY Fishery problems and their management alternatives go beyond the simple scope of fish stock analysis, encompassing the socio-economic and behavioral characteristics of fishermen. A case study is presented in which a fish-oriented community ...
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In coral reef environments, there is an increasing concern over parrotfish (Labridae: Scarini) due to their rising exploitation by commercial small-scale fisheries, which is leading to significant changes in the reefs' community... more
In coral reef environments, there is an increasing concern over parrotfish (Labridae: Scarini) due to their rising exploitation by commercial small-scale fisheries, which is leading to significant changes in the reefs' community structure. Three species, Scarus trispinosus (Valenciennes, 1840), Sparisoma frondosum (Agassiz, 1831) and Sparisoma axillare (Steindachner, 1878), currently labeled as threatened, have been intensively targeted in Brazil, mostly on the northeastern coast. Despite their economic importance, ecological interest and worrisome conservation status, not much is known about which variables determine their occurrence. In this study, we adopted a hierarchical Bayesian spatial-temporal approach to map the distribution of these three species along the Brazilian coast, using landing data from three different gears (gillnets, spear guns, and handlines) and environmental variables (bathymetry, shore distance, seabed slope, Sea Surface Temperature and Net Primary Prod...
Research Interests: Spatial Analysis, Species Distribution Models, Fisheries, Coral Reef Ecosystems, Coral Reefs, and 15 moreBrazil, International Marine Environmental Law, Bayesian Models, Small scale fisheries, Bayesian statistics & modelling, Biological Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Animals, Fishery Management, CHEMICAL SCIENCES, Perciformes, Ecosystem, Time Factors, Conservation of Natural Resources, and Bayes Theorem
In small-scale fishery, information provided by fishers has been useful to complement current and past lack of knowledge on species and environment. Through interviews, 82 fishers from the largest fishing communities on the north and... more
In small-scale fishery, information provided by fishers has been useful to complement current and past lack of knowledge on species and environment. Through interviews, 82 fishers from the largest fishing communities on the north and south borders of a Brazilian northeastern coastal state provided estimates of the catch per unit effort (CPUE) and rank of species abundance of their main target fishes for three time points: current year (2013 at the time of the research), 10, and 20 years past. This information was contrasted to other available data sources: scientific sampling of fish landing (2013), governmental statistics (2003), and information provided by expert fishers (1993), respectively. Fishers were more accurate when reporting information about their maximum CPUE for 2013, but except for three species, which they estimated accurately, fishers overestimated their mean CPUE per species. Fishers were also accurate at establishing ranks of abundance of their main target species...
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This study compared the consumption of animal protein and food sharing among fishers' and non-fishers' families of the northeastern Brazilian coast. The diet of these families was registered through the 24-hour-recall method... more
This study compared the consumption of animal protein and food sharing among fishers' and non-fishers' families of the northeastern Brazilian coast. The diet of these families was registered through the 24-hour-recall method during 10 consecutive days in January (good fishing season) and June (bad fishing season) 2012. Fish consumption was not different between the fishers' and non-fishers' families, but varied according to fisheries productivity to both groups. Likewise, food sharing was not different between the two groups, but food was shared more often when fisheries were productive. Local availability of fish, more than a direct dependency on fisheries, determines local patterns of animal protein consumption, but a direct dependency on fisheries exposes families to a lower-quality diet in less-productive seasons. As such, fisheries could shape and affect the livelihoods of coastal villages, including fishers' and non-fishers' families.
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This paper describes a case study of the changes in fishing that occurred in a Brazilian coastal community after a 10 year interval (1992-2002). There was a decrease in the mean amount of fish caught daily (from 14 kg to 11.32 kg) and... more
This paper describes a case study of the changes in fishing that occurred in a Brazilian coastal community after a 10 year interval (1992-2002). There was a decrease in the mean amount of fish caught daily (from 14 kg to 11.32 kg) and annually (from 4.2 t to 3.4 t) and in the richness of species caught (from 21 to 17 species); there was also a low similarity in the species composition of the fish landings (Morisita-Horn index Ch = 0.24). These changes suggested a decline in the locally exploited fish populations, which probably caused the discontinuation of commercial artisanal fishing. However, the diversity of fish caught by hook and line and purse-seine fishing was higher in the second period, whereas there was no significant difference in the diversity of fish caught using gillnets. Despite these changes, the CPUE showed no significant alteration and non-intensive fishing is still practiced by a few (6-35) people in the community. Co-management alternatives (fishing regulations, oysterfarms, ecotourism, etc.) are suggested and may be applicable to other coastal communities after appropriate adaptation for each location.
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O processo de Reforma Agrária é oferecido como uma possível estratégia para redução da pobreza e aumento da equidade social, mas depende de políticas públicas eficientes, tornando os agricultores beneficiados auto-sustentáveis.... more
O processo de Reforma Agrária é oferecido como uma possível estratégia para redução da pobreza e aumento da equidade social, mas depende de políticas públicas eficientes, tornando os agricultores beneficiados auto-sustentáveis. Objetivando apresentar as principais problemáticas socioambientais de 33 assentamentos rurais do Rio Grande do Norte (nordeste brasileiro), foram avaliados aspectos sociais, econômicos e ambientais de 631 famílias desses assentamentos e de 16 relatórios PRAD (Plano de Recuperação de Áreas Degradadas) do período de 2007 a 2010. Observou-se que a emancipação de um assentamento, medida através da geração de renda, grau de escolaridade e mudanças de hábitos ambientais, não está ligada ao seu tempo de fundação, e que a sua renda pouco depende da agricultura, sendo afetada principalmente pela proximidade de centros urbanos, pelo número de aposentados na família e pela participação em programas sociais. Os dados ambientais apontam o baixo nível de escolaridade e a m...
Fishers' local ecological knowledge (LEK) is an additional tool to obtain... more
Fishers' local ecological knowledge (LEK) is an additional tool to obtain information about cetaceans, regarding their local particularities, fishing interactions, and behavior. However, this knowledge could vary in depth of detail according to the level of interaction that fishers have with a specific species. This study investigated differences in small-scale fishers' LEK regarding the estuarine dolphin (Sotalia guianensis) in three Brazilian northeast coastal communities where fishing is practiced in estuarine lagoons and/or coastal waters and where dolphin-watching tourism varies from incipient to important. The fishers (N = 116) were asked about general characteristics of S. guianensis and their interactions with this dolphin during fishing activities. Compared to lagoon fishers, coastal fishers showed greater knowledge about the species but had more negative interactions with the dolphin during fishing activities. Coastal fishing not only offered the opportunity for fishers to observe a wider variety of the dolphin's behavior, but also implied direct contact with the dolphins, as they are bycaught in coastal gillnets. Besides complementing information that could be used for the management of cetaceans, this study shows that the type of environment most used by fishers also affects the accuracy of the information they provide. When designing studies to gather information on species and/or populations with the support of fishers, special consideration should be given to local particularities such as gear and habitats used within the fishing community.
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... Begossi. Priscila Fabiana Macedo Lopes. ... apparent. In some communities, fisheries are being reduced to a subsistence level, being displaced by real estate development and tourism (Diegues, 2006; MacCord and Begossi, 2006). ...
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ABSTRACT Marine protected areas created in a top-down way can be costly and ineffective due to low compliance of resource users. Conversely, employing users’ local knowledge and involving them in decision-making processes could decrease... more
ABSTRACT Marine protected areas created in a top-down way can be costly and ineffective due to low compliance of resource users. Conversely, employing users’ local knowledge and involving them in decision-making processes could decrease costs and conflicts, in addition to increasing the chances of management success. Here the potential to change conflicting MPAs into conservation areas that take into account fishers’ use and knowledge is assessed based on a case study on the Brazilian coast (Paraty town). Fishers (n=206) from 11 villages were interviewed regarding their main fishing targets and gear, and then only the experienced ones (n=41) were interviewed from three main fishing villages about the most important commercial species. Fish landings were sampled for one year in these three villages (n=823), where participatory mapping and group interviews with fishers were also conducted to determine their opinions regarding management and how they thought it should be undertaken. Management measures should not be equivalent across the whole region, as there were clear differences in the target species and gear used. Fishers identified 55 important fishing spots, eight of which were important for more than five villages, while the experts identified 10 important fishing areas for the target species, which was supported by the sampling of fish landings. The fishers were not opposed to management and no-take reserves but would make some changes in the current design of these measures if it were up to them. Based on these data, a few changes were indicated in the design of these areas that would likely reduce the conflict between fishers and enforcement agencies. This kind of approach could be used as a framework for adapting conflictive MPAs or to support the establishment of new ones where fisheries are relevant.
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This study uses the socio-ecological resilience concept to compare two categories of fisheries co-management in Brazil: Extractive and Sustainable Development Reserves. Ecological resilience was estimated by the indicators: reserve areas,... more
This study uses the socio-ecological resilience concept to compare two categories of fisheries co-management in Brazil: Extractive and Sustainable Development Reserves. Ecological resilience was estimated by the indicators: reserve areas, human density and ...
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... 123 ORIGINAL PAPER When does this fish spawn? Fishermen's local knowledge of migration and reproduction of Brazilian coastal fishes RAM Silvano Æ PFL MacCord Æ RV Lima Æ A. Begossi ... 2000; Haggan... more
... 123 ORIGINAL PAPER When does this fish spawn? Fishermen's local knowledge of migration and reproduction of Brazilian coastal fishes RAM Silvano Æ PFL MacCord Æ RV Lima Æ A. Begossi ... 2000; Haggan et al. 2003; Drew 2005; Mathooko 2005). ...
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Research Interests: Human Ecology, Environmental Economics, Ecological Economics, Applied Economics, Payment for Environmental Services, and 11 moreCase Study, Rio de Janeiro, Fishery Management, PES, Ecological, Marine Environment, Protected Area, Water Resource, Artisanal Fishery, ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND MANAGEMENT, and southeastern Brazil
Research Interests: Human Ecology, Fisheries Management, Rivers, Biological Sciences, Environmental Sciences, and 12 moreInterviews, Humans, Impact Assessment, Animals, Fishes, Population Density, Hydroelectric dams, Power Plants, Ecosystem, Conservation of Natural Resources, Ecological Applications, and Tropical Climate
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Pesca, etnoictiologia e ecologia de peixes em lagoas e igarapés do Baixo Rio Tocantins. ...