Management of Freshwater Fisheries in the XXI Century: Perspectives, Approaches and Challenges within a Sustainability Framework

Dear Colleagues,

Freshwater fisheries play a critical role in many of the world's large rivers and lakes by providing food security, nutrition, and employment, and represent an effective resource for poverty reduction. Freshwater fisheries usually have a complex marketing process in which various actors are interrelated, and where modification in any link of the commercialization chain will inevitably end up affecting the capture, transformation and commercialization of the resource. Thus, the adequate conservation of these fisheries is critical due to their high social value and their support for economic welfare.

Inland fisheries are mostly composed of small-scale subsistence, ornamental and recreational fisheries. The management of all these fisheries is difficult not only because they are often diverse, diffused or dispersed, but also because they lack adequate information and are conditioned by diverse and complex factors that affect their performance. In most cases, the conservation of fisheries is linked to watershed management, including land and water use, rather than to overfishing problems. In this context, problems such as the fragmentation of watercourses by dams; the loss of flows for irrigation; and urban, agricultural, livestock, and industrial and mining pollution, could have a serious impact on fisheries, which is enhanced in transboundary watersheds. In turn, natural hydrological variability or alterations in the hydrological regime caused by dams, but also exacerbated by climate change, become important causes influencing the performance of fisheries. As social–ecological systems, freshwater fisheries require the incorporation of a multidimensional basin management perspective, valuing them as ecosystem services that contribute to various SDGs, rather than being managed on an economic and extractive basis. In this context, and given that inland fisheries are affected and conditioned by multiple factors, it is challenging to recognize when these fisheries are being used sustainably and to detect when they are at risk due to intrinsic and external factors.

This Special Issue aims to expand the concept of sustainable freshwater fisheries an increase its visibility by examining different aspects of this concept. Case studies, perspectives and innovative conceptual approaches are welcome to address the challenge of managing inland fisheries in a sustainable state while also exploring how the different dimensions and the socio-economic and environmental settings interact in the conservation of fisheries.

Submitted articles may deal with several related relevant topics that may affect the sustainability of fisheries, including, but not limited to, the following:

• Infrastructure impacts on fisheries changes and performance;
• Governance processes and mechanisms oriented to support and manage transboundary fisheries;
• Influence of land use, water use, and water quality on fisheries;
• Modeling the responses of freshwater fisheries to climate changes and related ecosystem modifications;
• Tools, methods, and approaches for assessing the trends and sustainability of fisheries.

Dr. Claudio Baigun
Dr. Luis Espinola
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• fishery management
• land and water use
• small-scale fisheries
• socio-ecological systems
• sustainability indicators