Prohibiting fishing in conservation reserves is a common strategy for protecting ocean ecosystems and enhancing fisheries management.
Prohibiting fishing in conservation reserves is a common strategy for protecting ocean ecosystems and enhancing fisheries management. However, such dedicated reserves are rare in freshwater ecosystems, where conservation efforts generally piggyback on the protection of terrestrial habitats and species.
Now, a collaboration between researchers from Cornell and the University of Wisconsin-Madison has found that small, community-based reserves in Thailand’s Salween River Basin are serving as critical refuges for fish diversity in a region whose subsistence fisheries have suffered from decades of overharvesting.
The team’s paper, “A Network of Grassroots Reserves Protects Tropical River Fish Diversity,” published Nov. 25 in Nature.
The lead author is Aaron Koning, a former postdoctoral fellow with the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Nevada, Reno. The project was overseen by Pete McIntyre, the Dwight Webster Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow and associate professor of natural resources and environment in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Read more at: Cornell University
Photo Credit: milivanily via Pixabay
