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The list of threatened species (Red List), established by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), aims to provide global assessments on the extinction risk of species. However, protecting vulnerable populations requires establishing threat criteria at sub-global scales, e.g., national Red Lists. In data-poor contexts, typical of many developing countries, assessing threat status by applying IUCN criteria constitutes a major challenge, which may be one reason for mismatches between national and global Red List assessments. Despite the intense harvesting of threatened elasmobranchs species in Brazilian waters, Brazilian fisheries monitoring has ceased to exist for nearly a decade. This jeopardizes accurate assessment of species' conservation status at a local scale. In the absence of fisheries records, local ecological knowledge (LEK) provides an alternative option to obtain reliable information on targeted species. We interviewed 186 fishers from four Brazilian Northeastern states, whose recollections spanned six decades and documented catches or sightings of 19 shark species. For eight species with sufficient data, temporal trends in maximum length of sharks caught by fishers of different age-classes were statistically tested. Four species' maximum length declined over time, while four were primarily captured by elderly fishers, with few or no recent catches reported. Of these species, one is classified more conservatively in the national Red List vs. IUCN Red List, which is supported by LEK results. Contrastingly, two species are classified less conservatively at the national level than by IUCN, such that upgrading and matching IUCN's conservation criteria is warranted. We suggest that LEK provides support for conservation status listing in data-poor contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sharks developed life history traits that make them susceptible to overfishing. This is, in turn, a risk for extinction, and several species are affected. The high price of shark fins in the international trade has triggered the widespread capture of sharks at unsustainable levels, prompting illegal and unethical practices, such as finning. To address these concerns, the present study aimed to identify species composition using molecular techniques based on DNA barcoding and DNA polymorphism on samples taken from illegal shark fin seizures conducted by the Federal Environmental Agency of Brazil. A species-specific DNA-based identification from three finning seizures in Brazil found at least 20 species from 747 shark fins, some of which were identified as endangered and protected under Brazilian legislation, while others were representative of restricted catches, according to Appendix II of CITES. In the seizure from Belém, 338 fins were identified as belonging to at least 19 different species, while in the seizure from Natal 211, fins belonging to at least 8 different species were identified. Furthermore, 198 fins from Cananéia were identified through PCR-Multiplex as belonging to Isurus oxyrinchus. These results raise concerns about the environmental and socioeconomic effects of finning on developing countries. Furthermore, this study represents the first finning evaluation from Brazil in the Southwest Atlantic, highlighting the importance of developing policies aimed toward restricting and regulating the shark trade and detecting IUU fisheries and illegal trade of endangered species, mainly in developing countries, where fisheries management, surveillance, and species-specific fisheries catch data are often sporatic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]