An interview-based approach to assess marine mammal and sea turtle captures in artisanal fisheries

摘要: Recent case studies have highlighted high bycatch mortality of sea turtles and marine mammals in artisanal fisheries, but most countries there are few data on fishing effort, catch, or bycatch. With fisheries comprising >95% the world’s fishermen, this knowledge gap presents a major challenge to threatened species conservation sustainable initiatives. We report results from an intensive pilot study evaluate whether interview surveys can be effective assessing effort Fisheries interviews with >6100 fishermen seven developing were collected <1 year for approximately USD $47,000, indicating that approach may rapidly yield coarse-level information over large areas at low cost. This provided first characterizations many revealed widespread nature fisheries. Challenges design implementation prevented quantitative estimation spatial comparisons during research phase, suggested annual turtle number least thousands individuals per country. Annual odontocete hundreds Sirenian occurred all was frequent only West Africa. discuss lessons learned survey present revised protocol future interview-based assessments.