Linking Freshwater Fishery Management to Global Food Security and Biodiversity Conservation
Linking freshwater fishery management to global food security and biodiversity conservation Peter B. McIntyrea,1,2, Catherine A. Reidy Liermanna,1, and Carmen Revengab aCenter for Limnology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706; and bThe Nature Conservancy, Arlington, VA 22203 Edited by Peter M. Kareiva, The Nature Conservancy, Seattle, WA, and approved September 8, 2016 (received for review October 31, 2015) Fisheries are an essential ecosystem service, but catches from fresh- freshwaters worldwide. Thus, targeting regions where both bio- waters are often overlooked. Hundreds of millions of people diversity and fish catches are high could help to maximize the around the world benefit from low-cost protein, recreation, and benefits of global conservation efforts. commerce provided by freshwater fisheries, particularly in regions Ecological theory and experiments suggest that more species- where alternative sources of nutrition and employment are scarce. rich ecosystems often show higher productivity (19), but this pat- Here, we derive a gridded global map of riverine fisheries and tern has rarely been examined for upper trophic levels in natural assess its implications for biodiversity conservation, fishery sustain- systems at the global scale (20). Diversity–productivity relationships ability, and food security. Catches increase with river discharge and have not been tested for inland fisheries, but analyses of Pacific human population density, and 90% of global catch comes from river salmon stocks (21) and marine ecoregions (22) suggest that fish basins with above-average stress levels. Fish richness and catches are diversity can boost the predictability and magnitude of catches positively but not causally correlated, revealing that fishing pressure via a portfolio effect.
[Show full text]