Search Results (9)

This study examined Korean anglers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for the establishment of a Recreational Fishing Environment Fund (RFEF), aimed at mitigating the environmental impacts of recreational fishing on marine resources. As recreational fishing has expanded in Korea, concerns have grown over its negative effects on fishery resources and coastal pollution. Addressing these issues requires sustainable policy interventions, with financial support from stakeholders. To estimate anglers’ WTP for such a fund, a vignette survey was conducted in February 2024 among 1000 South Korean adults with experience or interest in recreational fishing. Using the Double-Bounded Dichotomous Choice Contingent Valuation Method (CVM), the present study estimated an average annual WTP of USD 8.18 per person. These findings provide essential data for designing coastal and ocean environmental policies based on the beneficiary pays principle, offering a financial framework to support conservation efforts and regulatory measures. The results highlight the potential for angler-funded environmental initiatives and can inform policymakers on the feasibility of implementing a dedicated fund for sustainable recreational fishing management. Full article

Coastal fisheries are vital for food supply, employment, and social stability. However, overfishing is a common problem, often attributed to open access. Territorial Use Rights in Fisheries (TURFs) have gained popularity as a tool to improve the sustainability of coastal fisheries, but research on TURFs in China is limited. This paper examines the island reef fishery lease policy implemented in Shengsi County, Zhejiang Province, within the Ma’an Islands National Marine Special Reserve. The policy leases the use of island reefs to a collective, aiming to address overfishing and resource degradation by establishing fishing area boundaries and limiting the number of users and usage time. Technically, it is an application of TURFs, and it represents a shift from traditional fishing licenses to collective compliance. This experience has disrupted the existing top–down fishery governance structure and signifies a transition to a rights-based fishery management system in China. Through a comprehensive investigation and analysis of the policy’s implementation, this research identifies the factors contributing to its flaws. These include the inadequate provision of national and local government policies, insufficient support for policy implementation from fishery management authorities, and the limited involvement of fishermen’s organizations. To enhance coastal fishery management, we propose that the Chinese government should build upon existing foundations by clarifying fishing rights through central and local laws and policies. Additionally, there is a need to strengthen data monitoring of coastal fisheries, conduct multidisciplinary research to improve the allocation mechanism of fishing rights, adopt diverse fishery management approaches to enhance supervision capabilities, establish a collaborative governance mechanism, and foster coordination and cooperation between grassroots fishermen’s organizations and government departments. Full article

Fish in the Volga-Kama River System (the largest river system in Europe) are important as a crucial food source for local populations; fish have the highest trophic level among hydrobionts. The purpose of this research is to describe the diversity of non-indigenous and native fish in the Volga and Kama Rivers, in the European part of Russia. This dataset encompasses data from June 2001 to September 2021 and comprises 1888 records (36,376 individual observations) for littoral and pelagic habitats from 143 sampling sites, representing 52 species from 42 genera in 22 families. The dataset has a Darwin Core standard format and has been fully released in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) under CC-BY 4.0 International license. The data are validated with several international databases such as FishBase, Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes, the Barcode of Life Data System, and the SAS.Planet geoinformations system. Newly established populations have been found for several species belonging to the following Actinopteri families: Alosidae, Anguillidae, Cichlidae, Ehiravidae, Gobiidae, Odontobutidae, Syngnathidae, and Xenocyprididae. Therefore, this dataset can be used in the particular taxon species distribution analysis, which are especially important for non-indigenous species. Full article

Aquaculture is a fast-growing food sector but is plagued by a plethora of bacterial pathogens that infect fish. The rearing of fish at high population densities in aquaculture facilities makes them highly susceptible to disease outbreaks, which can cause significant economic loss. Thus, immunity development in fish through vaccination against various pathogens of economically important aquaculture species has been extensively studied and has been largely accepted as a reliable method for preventing infections. Vaccination studies in aquaculture systems are strategically associated with the economically and environmentally sustainable management of aquaculture production worldwide. Historically, most licensed fish vaccines have been developed as inactivated pathogens combined with adjuvants and provided via immersion or injection. In comparison, live vaccines can simulate a whole pathogenic illness and elicit a strong immune response, making them better suited for oral or immersion-based therapy methods to control diseases. Advanced approaches in vaccine development involve targeting specific pathogenic components, including the use of recombinant genes and proteins. Vaccines produced using these techniques, some of which are currently commercially available, appear to elicit and promote higher levels of immunity than conventional fish vaccines. These technological advancements are promising for developing sustainable production processes for commercially important aquatic species. In this review, we explore the multitude of studies on fish bacterial pathogens undertaken in the last decade as well as the recent advances in vaccine development for aquaculture. Full article

Sustainable utilization evaluation is the basis for ensuring the sustainable exploitation of fisheries’ resources. This paper explores the changes in the mean trophic level of African marine fish catches during a 70-year period based on the statistical data on marine fisheries’ catches in Africa from 1950–2019, provided by the FAO in, order to determine the sustainable utilization of Africa’s fishery resources. The results indicate that although the marine fishery resources of African coastal countries have great variability, their exploitation has roughly gone through the stages of under-exploitation, rapid exploitation, and over-exploitation. Currently, marine fisheries in North and Central Africa are characterized by sustainable exploitation, while East, West, and Southern Africa are in a state of overfishing. The study implicates that African countries should establish a real-time monitoring system for marine fishery resources as soon as possible in order to dynamically grasp the actual changes in fish community structure due to fishing activities, ensure transparency in management and decision making, enact marine regulations to restrict massive fishing by overseas fleets, issue fisheries licenses cautiously, adopt conservative resource conservation policies, and enforce actions to achieve sustainable fisheries development. Full article

Background: Monitoring the ecological status of coastal ecosystems is essential to track the consequences of anthropogenic pressures and assess conservation actions. Monitoring requires periodic measurements collected in situ, replicated over large areas and able to capture their spatial distribution over time. This means developing tools and protocols that are cost-effective and provide consistent and high-quality data, which is a major challenge. A new tool and protocol with these capabilities for non-extractively assessing the status of fishes and benthic habitats is presented here: the KOSMOS 3.0 underwater video system. Methods: The KOSMOS 3.0 was conceived based on the pre-existing and successful STAVIRO lander, and developed within a digital fabrication laboratory where collective intelligence was contributed mostly voluntarily within a managed project. Our suite of mechanical, electrical, and software engineering skills were combined with ecological knowledge and field work experience. Results: Pool and aquarium tests of the KOSMOS 3.0 satisfied all the required technical specifications and operational testing. The prototype demonstrated high optical performance and high consistency with image data from the STAVIRO. The project’s outcomes are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA license. The low cost of a KOSMOS unit (~1400 €) makes multiple units affordable to modest research or monitoring budgets. Full article

The biological assessment of rivers i.e., their assessment through use of aquatic assemblages, integrates the effects of multiple-stressors on these systems over time and is essential to evaluate ecosystem condition and establish recovery measures. It has been undertaken in many countries since the 1990s, but not globally. And where national or multi-national monitoring networks have gathered large amounts of data, the poor water body classifications have not necessarily resulted in the rehabilitation of rivers. Thus, here we aimed to identify major gaps in the biological assessment and rehabilitation of rivers worldwide by focusing on the best examples in Asia, Europe, Oceania, and North, Central, and South America. Our study showed that it is not possible so far to draw a world map of the ecological quality of rivers. Biological assessment of rivers and streams is only implemented officially nation-wide and regularly in the European Union, Japan, Republic of Korea, South Africa, and the USA. In Australia, Canada, China, New Zealand, and Singapore it has been implemented officially at the state/province level (in some cases using common protocols) or in major catchments or even only once at the national level to define reference conditions (Australia). In other cases, biological monitoring is driven by a specific problem, impact assessments, water licenses, or the need to rehabilitate a river or a river section (as in Brazil, South Korea, China, Canada, Japan, Australia). In some countries monitoring programs have only been explored by research teams mostly at the catchment or local level (e.g., Brazil, Mexico, Chile, China, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam) or implemented by citizen science groups (e.g., Southern Africa, Gambia, East Africa, Australia, Brazil, Canada). The existing large-extent assessments show a striking loss of biodiversity in the last 2–3 decades in Japanese and New Zealand rivers (e.g., 42% and 70% of fish species threatened or endangered, respectively). A poor condition (below Good condition) exists in 25% of South Korean rivers, half of the European water bodies, and 44% of USA rivers, while in Australia 30% of the reaches sampled were significantly impaired in 2006. Regarding river rehabilitation, the greatest implementation has occurred in North America, Australia, Northern Europe, Japan, Singapore, and the Republic of Korea. Most rehabilitation measures have been related to improving water quality and river connectivity for fish or the improvement of riparian vegetation. The limited extent of most rehabilitation measures (i.e., not considering the entire catchment) often constrains the improvement of biological condition. Yet, many rehabilitation projects also lack pre-and/or post-monitoring of ecological condition, which prevents assessing the success and shortcomings of the recovery measures. Economic constraints are the most cited limitation for implementing monitoring programs and rehabilitation actions, followed by technical limitations, limited knowledge of the fauna and flora and their life-history traits (especially in Africa, South America and Mexico), and poor awareness by decision-makers. On the other hand, citizen involvement is recognized as key to the success and sustainability of rehabilitation projects. Thus, establishing rehabilitation needs, defining clear goals, tracking progress towards achieving them, and involving local populations and stakeholders are key recommendations for rehabilitation projects (Table 1). Large-extent and long-term monitoring programs are also essential to provide a realistic overview of the condition of rivers worldwide. Soon, the use of DNA biological samples and eDNA to investigate aquatic diversity could contribute to reducing costs and thus increase monitoring efforts and a more complete assessment of biodiversity. Finally, we propose developing transcontinental teams to elaborate and improve technical guidelines for implementing biological monitoring programs and river rehabilitation and establishing common financial and technical frameworks for managing international catchments. We also recommend providing such expert teams through the United Nations Environment Program to aid the extension of biomonitoring, bioassessment, and river rehabilitation knowledge globally. Full article

Viral disease outbreaks remain a significant limiting factor for aquaculture. The majority of licensed vaccines used in the industry are administered as oil-adjuvanted formulations carrying inactivated whole pathogens. Cell-mediated immune responses, in particular those based on virus-specific cytotoxic T-cells (CTLs) to conventional inactivated oil-based vaccines, are largely unexplored. As vaccines cannot be optimized against viral pathogens if knowledge of host cellular immune mechanisms remains unknown, in this study we examined fundamental cell-mediated immune responses after vaccination of rainbow trout with an oil-adjuvanted inactivated vaccine against salmonid alphavirus (SAV) and after infection with SAV. A unique in vitro model system was developed to examine MHC class I restricted CTL responses in a clonal line of rainbow trout. The levels of cell-mediated cytotoxicity were compared to pathology, virus load, specific antibody response, changes in immune cell populations, and mRNA expression. Our results hint that different protective mechanisms are being triggered by infection compared to vaccination. While vaccination itself did not cause a strong cytotoxic or humoral response, subsequent challenge of vaccinated fish resulted in significantly stronger and faster specific cytotoxicity, alongside reduced viral titers and pathology. Hence, testing a vaccine on the capacity to induce cell-mediated cytotoxicity will still require a challenge test. Examination of cellular markers additionally indicates that the initial innate response induced by the vaccine could play an important role in steering adaptive mechanisms. Full article

Marine fishery is an economically important sector and the primary source of livelihood for coastal fishers in Thailand, but the open access harvesting system and overfishing have depleted fish stocks. The country should address both the issues to sustain a healthy marine fishery and protect the lucrative export market as well as to maintaining seafood self-sufficiency. This paper explains the on-going processes of implementing the measures of restricting the number and size of fishing vessels and fishing efforts to control fishing capacity. The marine resources in the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea are categorized into three separate species groups: (1) demersal, (2) pelagic, and (3) anchovies. The precautionary approach is used as the guiding principle, and maximum sustainable yield (MSY) of the three combined resource categories is used as a reference point in setting the total allowable catch (TAC) limits in this exercise. The number of fishing days per vessel per year is stipulated by issuing licenses based on the TAC size and total allowable effort (TAE). Both the advantages and disadvantages of the current fishing allocation system are discussed. Full article