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Data-poor fisheries : case studies from the southern Mediterranean and the Arabian Peninsula

University of British Columbia

Considerable gaps of knowledge regarding the state of the marine fisheries occur in most economically developing countries despite the importance of fisheries as a source of food security and livelihood for their inhabitants. Global studies in fisheries science have often disregarded the data-poor fisheries in economically developing countries due to a combination of factors including the high cost and data requirements of classical stock assessments. However, other methods, less costly and equally reliable, such as the catch reconstruction approach combined with catch-based indicators and the most recent ‘CMSY’ stock assessment method have been developed to help assess the state of marine living resources. The countries of the Southern Mediterranean and the Arabian Peninsula (SMAP) are examples of where marine fisheries are not as well assessed as in other regions, aggravated by the frequency of political and socio-economic instability, the latest being the so-called “Arab Spring”, which has deeply impacted the regions. The "catch reconstruction" method, which improves official catch statistics, is applied here to re-estimate marine fisheries catches for the SMAP for 1950-2015 and to reconstruct a century of Mediterranean marine fisheries catches for Egypt (i.e., 1917-2017) to which two catch-based indicators, i.e., the Marine Trophic Index and the Mean Temperature of Catch were also applied. In the third part of this thesis the CMSY method is used to assess several commercially important fish stocks of the SMAP to provide decision makers with alternative policy options for better fisheries management and more effective marine conservation strategies.

Text

2020-04-23

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/74135

Resource Management and Environmental Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/