Abstract

Data limited fisheries pose a challenge for traditional stock assessment and management strategies, with harvest data lacking or entirely absent. In recreational fisheries that are legislatively managed or stakeholder managed to be catch-and-release only, fisheries dependent and independent data are not readily stored in a SQL database, and thus the human dimension of fisheries management comes to the forefront. Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK)—the institutional knowledge of practices and observations made by local resource users over time—is increasingly becoming a core component of managers’ and researchers’ efforts to better understand the historical and current state of a resource (Gilchrist et al. 2005; Anadon et al. 2009). Interview-based recall typically lends LEK datasets to be qualitative, and thus a coarse representation of resource and population trends. Coarse, qualitative LEK data in the form of Likert Scores—the numerical ranking of quality—have been compared to finer resolution quantitative trends in traditional stock assessments (i.e., spawning stock biomass SSB) in the Celtic Sea, and the trends observed in the LEK data were tightly correlated to SSB (Shephard et al. 2021). In so that coarse LEK trends correlate with traditional stock assessment methods, inferences can be made using LEK data in instances where standard fisheries dependent and independent data are absent, such as the flats catch-and-release fisheries of the Caribbean. These data can then be incorporated into models used to identify abiotic and biotic correlates of shifts in population decline and recovery. Here, we present an ongoing application of leveraging LEK interviews and publicly available abiotic and biotic datasets to identify influencers of spatiotemporal changes and decline in the Lower Florida Keys tarpon fishery, and the concept of actionable knowledge to provide spatially explicit suggestions for management.

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