WCS 3-Sentence Science

Community-Based Fisheries Management Fails to Protect Two Fish Species

July 11, 2019

Credit: Tim McClanahan/WCS

Each year, Wildlife Conservation Society scientists publish more than 300 peer-reviewed studies and papers. “WCS 3-Sentence Science” is a regular tip-sheet — in bite sized helpings — of some of this published work.

Here we present work by WCS’s Alec Hughes and Tingo Leve on challenges to communities-based fisheries management.

1. Community-based fisheries management that integrates local knowledge and existing user rights is often seen as a solution to the failures of top-down fisheries management in the Pacific.
2. Researchers found that in Roviana Lagoon, Western Solomon Islands, where a network of community-based marine protected areas was established in the early 2000s to conserve declining populations of bumphead parrotfish (Bolbometopon muricatum) and other locally valuable fish species such as humphead wrasse (Cheilinus undulatus), fisheries have continued to decline and now meet the IUCN Red List thresholds for Critically Endangered (CR).
3. The probable causes of these declines are sustained fishing pressure, poor enforcement of community-based management measures, and loss of fish nursery habitats due to logging, and suggest urgent co-management of the ridge-to-reef system is needed to prevent further fish population declines in Roviana Lagoon.

Study and Journal: “Community-based management fails to halt declines of bumphead parrotfish and humphead wrasse in Roviana Lagoon, Solomon Islands” from Coral Reefs
WCS Co-Author(s): Alec Hughes, Program Manager, WCS Melanesia; Tingo Leve, WCS Marine Technical Officer

For more information, contact: Stephen Sautner, 718–220–3682, ssautner@wcs.org.