Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation

Many coastal communities rely heavily on artisanal fisheries for income and food security, but this reliance can negatively affect the ecosystems they depend on. The challenge with artisanal fisheries is finding a balance between the use and conservation of marine resources. Many artisanal fishers use traditional management practices, which have been in place for centuries, such as tabus, created in Fiji. Without empirical data, however, it is difficult to determine the effectiveness of traditional management and the state of the fishery. The fishery must be assessed and monitored in order to determine the health of the fishery and the extent of a community’s fishing impact. This poses yet another challenge, since artisanal fisheries are still not well understood and communities often lack the funds to conduct effective assessments. The Pacific Blue Foundation, a nonprofit that strives to promote biological and cultural diversity in coastal regions, addressed this challenge by hiring a local woman on the island of Yanuca in Fiji to collect village catch data. This paper looks at the effectiveness of Pacific Blue Foundation’s method for data collection, preliminary analysis of the data, and possible ways to make improvements