RAPFISH: a rapid appraisal technique to evaluate the sustainability status of fisheries

RAPFISH is a new multi-disciplinary rapid appraisal technique for evaluating the comparative sustainability of fisheries. For the purpose of this analysis, fisheries may be defined flexibly as entities with a broad scope. such as all the fisheries in a lake, or with narrower scope, such as those in a single jurisdiction, target species, gear type or vessel. A set of fisheries may be compared, or the time trajectories of individual fisheries may be plotted. Attributes are chosen to reflect sustainability within each discipline, and although intended to remain tired Fur all analyses, may be refined or substituted as improved information becomes available. Ordinations of sets of attributes are performed using multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) followed by scaling and rotation. Ordinations are anchored by fixed reference points that simulate the best and worst possible fisheries using extremes of the attribute scores, while other anchors secure the ordination in a second axis normal to the first. Randomly scored reference points act as anchors and define significant differences. Separate RAPFISH ordinations may be performed in ecological, economic, ethical, social and technological disciplines: a further evaluation field expresses compliance with the FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. Monte Carlo simulation can be used to estimate errors, while the leverage of each attribute on scores can be estimated with a stepwise procedure. Status results may be expressed on a scale from 0 to 100%, and scores from several fields may be combined in kite diagrams to facilitate comparison of fisheries or fisheries constructed to represent alternative policies. Some validations of the methodology are presented. using simulated fishery data. Results from published work using RAPFISH are reviewed briefly, along with prospects for fut ther improvements to the technique. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.