About this Shiny App

Sixty percent of the world’s known coral and fish diversity sits within the political boundaries of the Philippines, Eastern Indonesia and some of their small island neighbors. A lot of this diversity sits in sparsely populated districts where government scientists often complain about being limited by budget in their monitoring abilities.

Creel counts – boatside interviews with fishers about their catch- offer a low cost source of information about species occurrence or species range that provincial and district governments could use to inform management decisions. An added benefit of using this methodology.

This website and interactive map attempts to create a “dashboard” for district-level managers. The data for this map comes from one year of fortnightly monitoring of fish landings in the five sub-villages of Mola on Wanci Island in Eastern Indonesia’s Wakatobi National Park.

This community offers a good small boat coral reef fishery case study given its unique position of simultaneously being within an administrative district (Kabupaten Wakatobi) and a national park (Taman Nasional Wakatobi). Established in 1996, the 1.39 million hectare Taman Nasional Wakatobi MPA is known for its healthy reefs (Tam, 2015). Small boat fishers are allowed to fish within a 804,000 hectare local exploitation zone (Adimu et al, 2018). Mola has the highest concentration of residents who identified as fishers in the Wakatobi district (1,090 of 5,062).

This schedule was created in response to fishers’ observation that landings were greater during spawning aggregations that are synchronized with the moon cycle (Sadovy de Mitcheson, 2008, Pet-Soede and Erdmann, 2003). Data was gathered over the span of one year to address the variability in catch volume and species richness due to season.

Catch composition was recorded in two ways: (1) the local name for the fish measured was recorded, (2) observers took a photograph of one example of the fish type for each boat whose catch was measured. This created a series of specimens to use as reference when translating local fish names to scientific family name and ecological trophic level. Feeding behavior was based on their description on FishBase (Froese & Pauly 2008; www.fishbase.org). It is not uncommon to gather landings data as per a folk taxonomy and back translate into scientific names (May 2005, Thyresson 2013).

An additional benefit of this methodology is that the count data can be collected by members of the fishers’ own community in their own language, which may increase trust in the data and resulting policies (Wilson, 2006).