Inland fisheries provide food, jobs, recreation and more to people across the globe. However, multiple natural (e.g. hurricanes) and human (e.g. development, pollution) caused pressures threaten freshwater fish and their habitats.  Evaluating stressors and their impacts on global inland fisheries can allow for more effective management, monitoring, and conservation, but unlike marine fisheries, standardized methods for assessing inland fisheries have previously been unavailable.

Going beyond usual fish and water quality data, National CASC researchers and co-authors gathered expert elicitation, or a synthesis of expert opinions, to better evaluate the state of inland fisheries. In a recently published article in Nature, the researchers describe how based of electronic surveys they were able to gather data from around the globe on fisheries professionals’ perception of various threats to inland fisheries, recent successes, and adaptive capacity measures within the respondent’s fishery of expertise. 

The dataset resulting from this work can be used to answer a variety of scientific questions and provide valuable insights about the social-ecological dynamics of inland fisheries at a global scale.