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The occupation of commercial fishing is recognized as a comparatively stressful and hazardous job characterized by a myriad of risks to health, including high rates of job‐related injury, morbidity, and mortality. Nonetheless, systematic study of fisher health is limited. This paper examines a particularly understudied aspect of illness among fishers: the physical and social contexts, pathways, and potential for adverse disease interactions. The focus of the paper is on a biosocial disease process called syndemics, which increases the health burdens of this population. The paper is presented as an initial testing of the hypothesis that a "lens" of syndemics improves occupational health research and advocacy for commercial fishermen who face a substantial burden of biosocial challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper synthesizes current empirical evidence on how women experience, shape and influence small‐scale fisheries (SSF) governance. Our synthesis addresses an important gap in the literature, and helps highlight the opportunities to improve women's participation in governance and advance gender equality. We identified, characterized and synthesized 54 empirical cases at the intersection of gender and SSF governance, which comprise the relevant body of literature. Our review confirms the need to embed gender in the empirical examination of SSF governance towards expanding the current evidence base on this topic. We found that the institutional contexts within which women participate reflect a broad spectrum of arrangements, including the interactions with rules and regulations; participatory arrangements such as co‐management; and informal norms, customary practices and relational spaces. We also synthesized a typology of governance tasks performed by women in SSF. The typology includes leadership roles and active participation in decision‐making; relational networking and collective action; exercising agency and legitimacy; resource monitoring; knowledge sharing; meeting attendance (with no/less participation in decision‐making); and activism and mass mobilization. Furthermore, we drew broader insights based on the patterns that emerged across the literature and highlighted implications for improving women's meaningful participation in SSF governance. For example, exploring the breadth of governance arrangements to include all governance spaces where women are active, adjusting governance arrangements to respond to current and emerging barriers, and recognizing how women's efforts link with societal values may help legitimize their representation in SSF governance. Findings of this review should be of interest to the scholarly community, practitioners and policymakers alike and inform future research agendas, policy dialogues and practice intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The USD6 billion Western and Central Pacific Ocean (WCPO) tuna fisheries produce over half the world's tuna and are important for coastal countries. Tuna fisheries policy, management and research currently focus on fisheries resources and industrial fishing on offshore vessels with all male crews, although women, as much as men, are employed in tuna processing and trading in domestic, informal and export value chains. We apply a gender lens to four WCPO case‐study tuna industries: Suva and Levuka in Fiji, Bitung in Indonesia, General Santos City in the Philippines and Western Province including Noro in Solomon Islands. The gender divisions of labour, livelihood opportunities and social impacts vary greatly across the value chain nodes, depending on the size, quantity and quality of fish handled, and the scale of operations. The gender lens also reveals the social impacts of fishing when husbands/fathers/sons are killed or injured, absent for long periods and engage in sex, drugs and alcohol behaviours in port. Despite the centrality of women in tuna industries, and the gendered social impacts, regional and national policies largely omit gender. The tuna discourse should be broadened from that of male‐dominated industrial fishing to whole of value chains including domestic and informal enterprises in which women are equally involved. Progress on gender equity needs collaboration by multiple stakeholders including industrial firms employing people in factories, offices and on fishing vessels, regional bodies and national governments responsible for policy, monitoring and regulation, and research agencies to build knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attention to human dimensions of capture fisheries involves understanding how harms and benefits are experienced and distributed among different groups or people. Yet, not all harms are well understood or adequately addressed. There is a general (mis)conception that gender‐based violence (GBV) is not of relevance for fisheries management or a topic within the remit of practitioners. Through a global review of capture fisheries, we illustrate how five types of GBV—physical, sexual, psychological, economic and cultural—are pervasive and can be reinforced by fisheries policies, practices and institutions. Our synthesis shows a variety of activities associated with these forms of violence, such as labour and human rights abuses, unsafe working and living conditions for children, women and men, and the cultural acceptance of various forms of discrimination. We argue GBV cannot be disentangled from other actions taken to achieve equitable social outcomes through fisheries management. We provide seven recommendations to help practitioners understand and work towards addressing GBV in capture fisheries: (1) removing gender blindness and bias by investing in gender‐sensitisation of the sector; (2) forming strategic partnerships; (3) improving policy and coordination between regulatory bodies; (4) increasing investments in labour rights and laws; (5) gender integrative programme design and implementation; (6) investing in specific programs for the empowerment of women; and (7) investing in specific programs for men seeking healthy models of masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Re-launch of Fish and Fisheries Special Issues and call for proposals We invite potential Guest Editors to complete a Special Issue proposal, for assessment by selected members of the Editorial Board, following guidelines available here. Following a virtual full Editorial Board meeting towards the end of last year, it was agreed to review membership of our Editorial Board, as well as identifying enhanced opportunities for I Fish and Fisheries i (FAF) in a rapidly changing publishing landscape. [Extracted from the article]

Diversification within fisheries operations can serve as an important form of self‐insurance against natural, regulatory and market risks to fishers' livelihoods. Diversification can take many forms, and yet the literature has primarily emphasised diversification across species to the exclusion of spatial and temporal dimensions of diversification. We analyse trends in diversification across species, space and time for all fishers along the entire continental West Coast of the United States from 1990 to 2015. Our findings reveal the importance of untangling both compositional (i.e. driven by changes in fleet composition) and individual (i.e. driven by within‐owner changes in diversification strategies) dimensions of diversification by showing how these effects have moved in contrary directions for all three forms of diversification. We also demonstrate how increases in temporal diversification have overwhelmed the overall stability of species and spatial diversification to leave the current fleet less exposed to financial variability compared to in the early 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental impacts on fisheries are pervasive, yet methods to account for them in stock assessments and management decisions vary in rigour and quality. The prevalence and efficacy of methods to account for environmental impacts are not well documented, limiting our ability to adequately respond to future environmental and climate changes for adaptive resource management. In Canada, legislation now requires that environmental conditions are considered in the management of fish stocks, yet the current extent of implementation in assessment processes is poorly understood. We assessed the use of climate, oceanographic and ecological considerations in science advisory processes for 178 stock assessments by Fisheries and Oceans Canada. We evaluated whether these considerations were included in conceptual hypotheses about broad‐scale mechanisms, quantitative or qualitative analyses, and the development of management advice on current or future stock status. Conceptual hypotheses were included in 46% of assessments; quantitative inclusions occurred in 21% of assessments, while qualitative interpretations appeared in 31% of assessments; and 27% of assessments included climate, oceanographic and/or ecological considerations in the advice. Assessments of salmonids, invertebrates and pelagic taxa more frequently made use of environmental data than those for groundfish and elasmobranchs. Comparing our findings with assessments in other jurisdictions highlighted a gap in Canada's ability to respond to environmental changes and a need to develop integrated management approaches, such as regional ecosystem assessments and approaches that combine modelling and empirical analyses, with socio‐economic analysis within interdisciplinary teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recreational fisheries were traditionally theorized to self‐regulate in a sustainable feedback loop in which recreational anglers moderate their fishing effort in response to population declines. However, several mechanisms are hypothesized to break down this self‐regulatory process, including recruitment variability and depensatory population dynamics. Although many of these mechanisms of instability have been estimated in empirical systems and explored using modelling, we still do not know the extent to which these mechanisms can (1) erode stability at their observed strength in real systems and (2) interact to dampen or intensify each other's effects. In this study, we synthesize existing data on four of these mechanisms: (1) depensation in the stock‐recruit relationship, (2) recruitment stochasticity, (3) density‐dependent catchability and (4) the strength of anglers' responsiveness to changing catch rates. We report the range of observed values for these four mechanisms in real‐world fisheries and observe their effect on a simplified recreational fishery model. We find that at moderate fishing effort none of the mechanisms was destabilizing enough on its own to collapse the modelled population, but that an angler population that was likely to keep fishing when catch rates approached zero was a key element of interactions that caused collapse. The strongest interaction was between an angler population with this characteristic and a fish population with hyperstable catch rates. Our results highlight the need for more consistent and widespread estimation of utility‐based angler effort functions as well as the importance of interdisciplinary teams that can gather both social and ecological data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is challenging in fisheries stock assessment to estimate cohort dynamics from length‐based data for hard‐to‐age stocks, and existing approaches, for example, age‐structured catch‐at‐length models (ACL) are unable to account for length‐dependent processes within each cohort. Fisheries‐dependent data are usually considered the default input to stock assessment models. However, with widespread recognition of the uncertainty of fisheries‐dependent data and the increasing availability of high‐quality survey data, a new situation emerges in some fisheries where a stock assessment model based only on survey data can provide good estimation of population dynamics. We develop an age‐ and length‐structured statistical catch‐at‐length model (ALSCL) to estimate age‐based dynamics from survey catch‐at‐length data. This approach also provides a good basis to then integrate fisheries‐dependent data in the model. ALSCL can explicitly include length‐dependent mortality and growth within each cohort by simultaneously tracking the three‐dimensional dynamics across time, age, and length. We first use simulations of yellowtail flounder (Limanda ferruginea, Pleuronectidae) and bigeye tuna (Thunnus Obesus, Scombridae) to demonstrate that ALSCL outperforms ACL by providing more accurate estimates of age‐based population dynamics when length‐dependent processes are important. Next, we apply ALSCL to estimate the cohort dynamics of female yellowtail flounder on the Grand Bank off Newfoundland using survey catch‐at‐length, weight‐at‐length, and maturity‐at‐length data. We consider ALSCL as a hybrid between ACL and length‐structured stock assessment models that keeps the advantages of both, and its ability to simultaneously track age and length dynamics is an important step toward the next‐generation of fisheries stock assessment models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Co‐management—fisher participation in fisheries management—varies across two fundamental dimensions. The most commonly addressed is a 'ladder of participation' reflecting the degree to which decision‐making is shared between government and fishers. The other dimension reflects if, and how, co‐management is implemented across the 'management spectrum' of functional components of management: (1) direction‐setting, planning and policy development; (2) harvest management; (3) compliance and enforcement; (4) ecosystem stewardship, conservation, rehabilitation; (5) research; and (6) organizational management and development. This article presents an approach to combining these two dimensions in a comprehensive manner, to better understand and assess the nuances of co‐management in practice. The approach is tested through application to fisheries of Nova Scotia, Canada, with representatives of organized fisher associations assessing the nature and extent of participation, both current and desired, for each of the six management components. This leads to insights about the fishery management components that tend to have greater or lesser fisher participation, differences in perceived levels of current and desired participation, the willingness and capacity of fisher associations to take on various management tasks and potential directions to improve fishery co‐management practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]