Community-based monitoring of small-scale fisheries with digital devices in Brazilian Amazon

Fisheries management is potentially a short-term measure for reducing floodplain fisheries degradation. This objective can only be achieved if adequate measures to improve fishery governance and ecosystem conservation are taken. The monitoring of fisheries management is likely to be important for understanding the effectiveness of local rules and the impacts on aquatic biodiversity. Given that monitoring is the periodic assessment of fish stock characteristics regarding reference data, adopting tools and procedures for monitoring at different scales is a challenging task. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have enabled local communities to gather data on key resources in a cost-effective way. This article presents a community-based monitoring of fisheries based of smartphones that supports the annual fishing quotas and legal harvest permits procedures. The precision of community-based monitoring data is assessed and a model to integrate these data into a large-scale monitoring scheme examined. Data collection performance was evaluated at communities in the Kaxinawa Nova Olinda Indigenous Territory, in the State of Acre, where fishery management was monitored. The results indicate that voluntary collectors are able to provide data with precision comparable with government agency measurements, but at lower cost.