Integrating Cross-scale Socio-Ecological Feedbacks in Freshwater Fisheries

Freshwater fisheries provide food, income, and recreation to millions of people. Conventional management of these systems typically relies on the implementation of management rules based on assessments of fish populations. Little consideration is given to the ability of governments to enforce management rules or the social factors that affect the motivations of fishers to comply with them. Consequently, freshwater fisheries are often poorly managed and overfished in much of the globe. Funded by NSF CNH2 program, and working with community-based management of arapaima in the Brazilian Amazon, this project will integrate fish ecology, population dynamics, institutional analysis, and social psychology to understand the social and ecological factors affecting the sustainability of freshwater fisheries.

We will study interactions between floodplain ecosystems, movement of arapaima, and their use of lakes on the ecological side, and culture, community, institutions, and fisher rule compliance on the social side (Fig. 1). We will use an integrated modeling approach that incorporates social and ecological components at three scales of analysis to produce novel and general insights on the integrated dynamics of arapaima fisheries. To do this, we will collect extensive socio-ecological data and use knowledge co-production with fishers and managers to address four overarching research questions. Our first question assesses how habitat and connectivity affect arapaima movement among lakes to identify drivers of arapaima lake use, and thereby explain their abundance across the ecosystem. Our second question assesses how fishers’ perceptions of arapaima lake abundance, and income they derive from fishing, affect their compliance with rules set by the Brazilian government, given community culture, leadership, and institutional arrangements. Our third question assesses how rule compliance is affected by regional factors, markets, and government rules. Because the emergent property of sustainability arises from the interplay of social and ecological factors, our fourth question will determine how ecosystem habitat and connectivity and fishers’ rule compliance affect the dynamics of arapaima populations.

Our approach will push knowledge frontiers by pioneering contributions to the theory, methods, and applications of coupled natural and human systems research to freshwater fisheries and other common pool resources such as marine fisheries or wildlife, using arapaima fisheries as a case study. Research results will inform policy on the integrated dynamics of community-based management of fish resources. In addition to education of graduate students and peer-reviewed publication of the research, we will build on our case study to develop an open-access, web-based training program on fisheries as coupled natural and human systems aimed at senior-level undergraduate students. This program will use written, video, and project-based materials to contribute to fill the growing demand in higher education for development and sharing of teaching materials in coupled human and natural systems. The project is led by four main faculty who will coordinate different aspects of the project: L. Castello, H. Kindsvater, M. Sorice, and E. Brondizio, including a broad range of collaborators in the US, Brazil, Canada, and UK.

Leandro Castello