RAPFISH: a rapid appraisal technique to evaluate the sustainability statusof fisheries

RAPFISH is a new multi-disciplinary rapid appraisal technique for evaluatin g the comparative sustainability of fisheries. For the purpose of this anal ysis, fisheries may be defined flexibly as entities with a broad scope. suc h 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 fisher ies may be compared, or the time trajectories of individual fisheries may b e plotted. Attributes are chosen to reflect sustainability within each disc ipline, and although intended to remain tired Fur all analyses, may be refi ned or substituted as improved information becomes available. Ordinations o f sets of attributes are performed using multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) fo llowed 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 sec ond axis normal to the first. Randomly scored reference points act as ancho rs and define significant differences. Separate RAPFISH ordinations may be performed in ecological, economic, ethical, social and technological discip lines: a further evaluation field expresses compliance with the FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. Monte Carlo simulation can be used to e stimate errors, while the leverage of each attribute on scores can be estim ated 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 diag rams to facilitate comparison of fisheries or fisheries constructed to repr esent alternative policies. Some validations of the methodology are present ed. using simulated fishery data. Results from published work using RAPFISH are reviewed briefly, along with prospects for fut ther improvements to th e technique. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.