2022 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Virtual Conference

March 13 - 15, 2022

5/22/2019 | 9:30 AM - 9:45 AM | COMMUNITY CONSEQUENCES OF INDISCRIMINATE OVERFISHING IN LARGE TROPICAL RIVERS | 150 G

COMMUNITY CONSEQUENCES OF INDISCRIMINATE OVERFISHING IN LARGE TROPICAL RIVERS

Inland fisheries provide millions of people with their primary source of nutrition and livelihoods, especially in the world’s largest tropical rivers. While the potential impact of climate change and hydropower development on fish yields has raised concerns, overharvest remains a key challenge to sustainable inland fisheries. Assessing these fisheries using common tools for marine systems can be inadequate because tropical inland fisheries are indiscriminate, highly diverse, and data-limited. Here we develop new metrics to assess indiscriminate fisheries and test them against an unprecedented tropical inland fisheries timeseries. We find that while yields remain stable, catch species composition changes according to a three staged development model. In early stages, when exploitation is light to moderate, catch Shannon-diversity increases as large, dominant and high revenue species, are developed into. When exploitation is moderate, Shannon-diversity plateaus as previously dominant taxa are replaced by a diverse set of species. Finally, at late stages, Shannon-diversity is expected to decrease as fast-growing species dominate catches. We conclude that this inverted U-shaped Shannon-diversity curve is characteristic of indiscriminate and diverse inland fisheries development and can aid in assessing the sustainability of data-limited tropical river fisheries.

Biodiversity
Food Webs
Tropics

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Presenters/Authors

Sebastian Heilpern (), Columbia University, s.heilpern@columbia.edu;