Catch and effort monitoring 2010-2020, 2 rural villages (anon), Western Province, Solomon Islands

Co-management is a mainstream approach for governing social and ecological aspects of small-scale fisheries. Yet while many assessments of co-management are available for single time periods, they are rare across longer time-scales – meaning the dynamic nature, and long-term outcomes, of co-management are poorly understood. In this study we analyse ten-years of catch and effort data from a co-managed, multi-species reef fishery in Solomon Islands. We collected fishing trip and catch data from two villages. Although fishing took place in pelagic and mangrove areas, we only consider data from reef fishing grounds. Sampling coincided with community-planned openings of periodically-harvested closures and were opened to harvesting, during the full period of openings, and for at least two weeks during closures. Observers asked fishers to provide details of their fishing trip as soon as they returned to shore fishing trips), including: time of departure and time of return, method of transport (i.e., paddle canoe or boat with engine), number of fishers on the trip, gear(s) used, name of fishing ground(s), fished area description(s) (i.e., reef or other), and the harvesting strategy applied in the area (i.e., continuously open reef or periodically-harvested closure). Where method or fishing ground varied within a trip, these were specified and assigned to the appropriate fish or invertebrates within the catch. Trips were classified according to target type: finfish, invertebrate, mixed (i.e., finfish and invertebrates collected in the same trip) and ‘other’ (e.g., seaweed). Catch was weighed (i.e., total wet weight) using hanging scales (either a 10 kg/5 g digital scale or 22 kg/250 g analogue scale, depending on the size of the catch). Local nomenclature ([39], unpublished data) was used for counting and recording purposes.