An Improved Reconstruction of Total Marine Fisheries Catches for the New Hebrides and the Republic of Vanuatu, 1950–2014

Abstract

For many small island nations, fisheries provide residents with both food security and economic stability. However, in order to create effective and sustainable fisheries policies and management that will ensure a growing population can prosper, policy makers need to know what is being fished and how much is fished. Vanuatu, the smallest country in Melanesia, has a declared and claimed Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of over 820,000 km 2 and fisheries resources play a large part in the food security and economic stability of this country. This reconstruction of the total marine fisheries catch of Vanuatu for 1950-2014 faced major data gaps. It showed that the reconstructed total catches of nearly 1.4 million tonnes (metric tons) 40% higher than the 977,997 tonnes reported by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on behalf of Vanuatu for the same period. However, if large-scale industrial catches are excluded, the reconstructed small-scale fisheries catches (∼270,000 tonnes) were over 200% higher than the 114,862 tonnes of reported catch that were assumed to represent the small-scale sector in FAO data. Subsistence catches made up almost 93% of small-scale catches, followed by artisanal and recreational catches with ∼7 and <1%, respectively. By continuously improving the fisheries data of Vanuatu for both the past and the present, policy makers, stakeholders, and fishers can make better decisions that will maintain the benefits of marine fishery resources.

Estimating Global Catches of Marine Recreational Fisheries

“…Indeed, the major problem with official national and hence global statistics is widespread underreporting, which especially affects small-scale fisheries (e.g., Zeller et al, 2015). The Sea Around Us 1 , based on the rationale in Pauly (1998) as operationalized by Zeller et al (2016), has completed over 200 historical 'catch reconstructions' to begin addressing this under-reporting challenge (e.g., Smith and Zeller, 2016;Derrick et al, 2017;Léopold et al, 2017;Cashion et al, 2018;Freire et al, 2018;Popov and Zeller, 2018), of which about half have been published in peer-reviewed outlets. These reconstructions not only cover every maritime country and territory in the world (Pauly and Zeller, 2016b), but also address both commercial and non-commercial fisheries, such as the small-scale subsistence (e.g., Zeller et al, 2015) and recreational fisheries (e.g., Smith and Zeller, 2016).…”

Understanding consequences of adaptive monitoring protocols on data consistency: application to the monitoring of giant clam densities impacted by massive mortalities in Tuamotu atolls, French Polynesia

“…However, the consequences of switching protocols on data quality and time-series consistency must be understood. In some instances, rebuilding coherent time series of fishery catches was problematic for this reason and became a huge effort (Léopold et al, 2017).…”