Photo from MaxPixel, CC0.
The Sea Around Us data offered through this website are vast and complex and when large database queries are made, or multi-dimensional charts are rendered, our services may slow down or become unavailable.
Seeking to improve data access, avoid time delays, and provide a better user experience to enhance meaningful analysis and research, we have partnered with UBC Cloud Innovation Center (UBC CIC).
Traditional fishing pirogue in Madagascar. Photo by Jonathan Talbot, World Resources Institute, Flickr
Substantial growth in the number of motorized vessels operating in the Mozambique Channel region between East Africa and Madagascar in the past 65 years has led to a 60-fold increase in effective small-scale fishing effort and a 91 per cent decline in Catch Per Unit of Effort (CPUE).
Recreational fisher at Baker Beach, California. Photo by mgstanton, Flickr.
The Sea Around Us is pleased to announce that the marine fisheries catch data and derived indicators have been updated to the year 2018.
To mark World Oceans Day 2021, the Sea Around Us team took on a challenge presented by NGO Mundus Maris and decided to think about one of the many problems our oceans are facing and reflect on the efforts being made to address the issue at hand.
This is how the above video came to be.
Since fisheries are at the centre of our work, we wanted to shed light on how reinterpretations of the Maximum Sustainable Yield model developed in 1954 by M.B. Schaefer are encouraging fishing practices that decimate fish populations.
Based on the paper “MSY needs no epitaph—but it was abused” by Daniel Pauly and Rainer Froese, and the paper “Fishery biomass trends of exploited fish populations in marine ecoregions, climatic zones and ocean basins” by Palomares et al., the video shows how the initial Schaefer model, which refers to the theoretical highest catch that a fish stock can support in the long-term given that environmental conditions do not change much, has been modified by fisheries scientists and managers to a point where it promotes overfishing.
But if kept in its original format and when combined with recently developed computer-intensive stock assessment methods, the Schaefer model has been identified – both in the literature and in the video – as a viable mechanism for effective ecosystem-based fisheries management.