A global dataset of inland fisheries expert knowledge

Abstract

Inland 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. Integrating expert knowledge on the distribution, intensity, and relative influence of human activities can guide natural resource management strategies and institutional resource allocation and prioritization. This paper introduces a dataset summarizing the expert-perceived state of inland fisheries at the basin (fishery) level. An electronic survey distributed to professional networks (June-September 2020) captured expert perceptions (n = 536) of threats, successes, and adaptive capacity to fisheries across 93 hydrological basins, 79 countries, and all major freshwater habitat types. This dataset can be used to address research questions with conservation relevance, including: demographic influences on perceptions of threat, adaptive capacities for climate change, external factors driving multi-stressor interactions, and geospatial threat assessments.

Fig. 1

Workflow used to generate and analyse the data outputs, where the survey design (i.e., survey questions, answer choices, and content organization) came from literature review and expert input from the 2019 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Advisory Roundtable on the Assessment of Inland Fisheries; data collection came from responses based on two email distributions and snowball sampling; and data sharing resulted from data processing and analyses.

Fig. 2

The global distribution of georeferenced responses (orange circles; n = 432) in the dataset, excluding those without geographic coordinates (n = 104; region or subregion only), where major basins (dark grey) represent hydrological basins accounting for 95% of inland fish catch; and minor basins (light grey) represent all other hydrological basins (HydroBASINS level 3).

Fig. 3

Survey responses summarized by (a) threat score counts by threat category and (b) adaptive capacity domains by response type. (a) shows the total response counts of the number of provided threats (n = 29) selected in respondents’ fisheries (range = 0–29), summed by major threat category (n = 5; fill colors) across overall fishery threat scores (1–10; x-axis). (b) depicts adaptive capacity domains in respondents’ fisheries (n = 467, except “assets” = 466), shown as the percent of responses in each adaptive capacity domain, and colored according to respondent answers (Likert scale; five categorical choices from strongly disagree to strongly agree).