Development of a data-poor harvest strategy for a sea cucumber fishery

Abstract Highly valuable and easily accessible marine natural resources fished under traditional “open access” arrangements pose immense challenges for sustainable management. This is particularly the case for communities struggling to balance food security, conservation and economic trade-offs. Sea cucumber (beche-de-mer) fisheries across the Indo-Pacific and Caribbean are mostly fished for economic benefit (exported predominantly to Asian markets), and many species are considered heavily overfished. Most of these fisheries are data-poor and management is challenged by the dispersed and small-scale nature of fishing operations, and sometimes inadequate buy-in to sustainable harvest practices from stakeholders. In this study we developed a tiered harvest strategy for a commercial Indigenous-owned multi-species sea cucumber fishery in Torres Strait, northern Australia. The harvest strategy specifies pre-agreed, transparent rules for monitoring and use of fishery-dependent and fishery-independent data as inputs to decision rules to regulate the fishery. The strategy outlines a tiered, step-wise approach for how data can be used to adjust the fishery take while managing risks to a resource and supporting community aspirations. This creates incentives for data collection to support the fishery. The strategy encourages voluntary application of customary and traditional laws at the local scale. It advances attempts for modern fisheries management approaches to be cognisant of the history of Indigenous Community’s stewardship knowledge in order to reinforce compliance and improve sustainable outcomes. The tiered harvest strategy framework has been implemented in Torres Strait and is also likely to be applicable to other sea cucumber and data-poor fisheries.