Impacts of fisheries bycatch on marine turtle populations worldwide: toward conservation and research priorities

By Bryan P. Wallace, Connie Y. Kot, A. Dimatteo, Tina S. Lee, LB Crowder, Rebecca Lewison. 2013

234 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Fisheries bycatch is considered the most serious threat globally to long-lived marine megafauna (e.g., mammals, birds, turtles, elasmobranchs). However, bycatch assessments to date have not evaluated population-level bycatch impacts across fishing gears. Here, we provide the first global, multi-gear evaluation of population-level fisheries bycatch impacts for marine turtles. To compare bycatch impacts of multiple gears within and among marine turtle populations (or regional management units, RMUs), we compiled more than 1,800 records from over 230 sources of reported marine turtle bycatch in longline, net, and trawl fisheries worldwide that were published between 1990–2011. The highest bycatch rates and levels of observed effort for each gear category occurred in the East Pacific, Northwest and Southwest Atlantic, and Mediterranean regions, which were also the regions of highest data availability. Overall, available data were dominated by longline records (nearly 60% of all records), and were non-uniforml...

Subfields: Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/10e14c26e5320777e3a03efacedd4192b75b055e

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In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Conservation implications of sea turtle nesting trends: elusive recovery of a globally important loggerhead population (2019, methodology): “…there has been some improvement in bycatch in a few localized instances (Finkbeiner et al. 2011, Gilman and Huang 2017, Swimmer et al. 2017), the issue of bycatch is far from being resolved and continues to pose a serious threat to sea turtle recovery (Wallace et al. 2013a, Rees et al. 2016).”
Are we working towards global research priorities for management and conservation of sea turtles (2016, background): “A major threat is fisheries bycatch (see Q13), and there have been significant advances evaluating and addressing this threat, particularly in small-scale fisheries in developing nations (Wallace et al. 2013, Lewison et al. 2015).”
Marine megafauna interactions with small-scale fisheries in the southwestern Indian Ocean: a review of status and challenges for research and management (2018, background): “However, qualitative global assessments rank loggerhead, leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea) and olive ridley (Lepidochelys olivacea) as high risk species in the western Indian Ocean, with olive ridley and green considered to face the greatest levels of threat to survival (Wallace et al. 2011, 2013).”
Addressing fisheries bycatch in a changing world (2015, background): “For example, Wallace et al. (2013) developed bycatch impact scores that integrate information on bycatch rates, fishing effort, mortality rates, and body sizes to assess effects and risk for global sea turtle populations.”