Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue Podcast session 134. Is there an inequality in the coverage of artisanal fisheries globally in the research of artisanal fisheries to be exact? That's what we're going to determine and identify in today's research Thursday here on the Speak Up For Blue Podcast. Back to another exciting episode of the Speak Up For Blue Podcast, your voice for the ocean. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, founder of SpeakUpForBlue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean printer. That's right. I am an entrepreneur where everything I do has to do with protecting the ocean and keeping it healthy for the next generation. What's up, everybody? This is an interesting episode because yes, we're going to do research Thursday again. I've been kind of getting away from sort of the regular routine just because it's March Break here and my routine is all shot to hell really. It's changed up. My kids are gone, so the period between four o'clock and eight o'clock is very different for me. So I've been actually recording during those times when I get home from work and it's a little different. It's making things a little different. So I haven't had the chance to prepare our regular routine, but I like research Thursday so much that I want to keep it going. So today we're going to talk about research about research. It's going sort of behind the scenes of ocean conservation and fisheries research and really looking at where the research is done and how it's done and where it needs to go. And the authors here are from, let's see here, they are from Brazil and the United Kingdom. So there's a bunch of options, Jose Gilmar, Sio Levira, Jr., Luana Pia Silva, Anna Mulhaldo, Van Dick Batista, Nadia Fabre, Richard Laedel, okay, and they're from Brazil, Richard Lales, from the School of Geography and Environment University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. And they really looked at, the article is called Artisanal Fisheries Research, a Need for Globalization. And what it's about essentially is they look at Artisanal Fisheries. If you don't know what Artisanal Fisheries, the difference, so Artisanal Fisheries essentially is people gathering fish or fishing for fish that are really more for the local community or it's a specific family, that say that fishing family is to feed themselves and to sustain themselves. Because commercial fisheries is more of, let's feed the masses, right, it's more of like a warehouse type thing, we're going to feed as many people as possible and make as much money as possible. Where Artisanal Fisheries is more of, yes, we want to make money, sustain our families, but we also will eat a lot of the food that we catch, right, so it's very localized fishing. And it's done all over the world and in fact, according to the authors, and of course obviously I agree, you know, Artisanal Fishing, where is it here, let me just look at the contains, let's just see, sorry, Artisanal Fisheries, there is a specific quote that I was looking for and I'm not prepared for it, damn it, anyway, I can't find it right now in the article. I will post up the link to the article SpeakUpForBlue.com/session134. But essentially what they talk about is Artisanal Fishing is very important to support local livelihoods, food security and poverty alleviation in developing countries. And I just found it right here in the abstract. So here it is, they want to test the hypothesis using research on Artisanal Fisheries. Such fisheries occur throughout the world, but are especially prominent in developing countries where they are important for supporting local livelihoods, food security, and poverty alleviation. Now, you got to remember, I know a lot of people are thinking over fishing, it's wrong, we shouldn't be fishing at all, we should hold off from fishing, but you got to remember some people, a lot of people around the world, especially in developing countries, have nothing else to eat. This is how they get their protein, this is how they get their fats, this is how they get their nutrients, is they get it from fish and seafood. So it's extremely important that they do it. Now, unfortunately, a lot of, especially according to these authors, a lot of these Artisanal Fisheries are not regulated. So we don't know what's happening, one, we don't monitor the fisheries, and two, we don't know what's happening to the fish because we're not monitoring it. So one leads to the other. So not having a regulated fisheries, just like we do for commercial fishing or Artisanal Fisheries in developed countries, can be a problem. So what they wanted to do is look at why is there such a gap, like where is the gap? Is there a gap between who's covering Artisanal Fisheries, like why are we only seeing research on Artisanal Fisheries in the US territories or US or Canada or the UK? Is there a dominant force, like is there a dominant force in science or dominant scientists or institutions that are getting their articles out there? They look, they essentially, they made the hypothesis that, or the assumption that developed country institutions and scientists were more likely to publish science, their science, their research on Artisanal Fisheries that will actually go into high impact journals. So journals that are really well regarded, whereas institutions and scientists in those institutions, in the southern global countries, the territories and what on the smaller countries, where we look at it and we say, "Oh, well, there's not much research coming out there," or if the research is, it's coming in the low impact journals, which means they don't get read all that often. So you got a lot of difference there and you wonder, "Okay, what's happening?" Why is there such an influence? Where's that influence coming from? What's the difference in there? And it's interesting, so what we're going to do in this article, what the authors did in this article, they looked up articles and found out where the most articles on Artisanal Fisheries were and who didn't? Where were they from? What institutes were they from? Where did they publish? All that kind of stuff. So they did a search. They did a search using the terms Artisanal Fisheries or Artisanal Fishing or Small Scale Fisheries, okay, and the methodology was designed to capture a representative and largely geographic unbiased sample of articles on Artisanal Fisheries and they returned 1,127 records, that's quite a bit. Now, the valid records were divided into three distinct subsets, time subsets, was 1973 to 2004, 2005 to 2009, 2010 to 2014, again, most of the information, it's all in the article, it's on PLSO1, so you can get to it, just the link will be in the article on our website, so if you go to the show notes, speak up for blue.com/session134, you'll be able to find it. So from the 1,127 records generated by the search, the 661 were considered valid for the analysis. These articles were published in 165 journals, the 10 most popular journals of Artisanal Small Scale Coastal Fisheries Sciences were Fisheries Research, there were 79 articles, Marine Policy, there were 78 articles, Ocean and Coastal Management, 33 articles. I, C, E, S, Journal of Marine Sciences, 17 articles, Ecology and Society, 16 articles, Scienceia, Marina, 13 articles, Aquatic Living Resources, 12 articles, Fisheries Management and Ecology, 12 articles, Boledim Do Instituto de Pescas, my apologies if I didn't have a good accent on that, the 11 articles and Rivista de Bailad, Bailogia, Bailogia Tropical is 10 articles. So we're going to look at the most, that's where the journal article names of where these articles were published, the 165 different journals were the top ones, the top 10. Then you're looking at the top, or the most productive countries in terms of high quality knowledge production about Artisanal and Small Scale Coastal Fisheries were the US 101 articles, Brazil 85 articles, Canada 65 articles, Spain 63 articles, UK 63 articles, Mexico 52 articles, France 48 articles, Australia 33 articles, Portugal 27 articles and Chile 26 articles. The USA was the most central in the country level authorship networks for the three periods and was also characterized by the largest number of interactions. So the way after they found out who was the top, they looked at how many sort of cross pollinated, how many interacted, how many collaborated on different research papers. So what they do is they have networks of these diagrams of networks of each country and how they interact. So if there's a lot of lines going to one country, then there's a lot of interaction. If you look, you can see on the show notes, if you look at the article between 1973 and 2004 time gap, there were very little connections between different countries. So Chile only connected to Spain. Spain connected to Italy and France, that was it. Italy connected to Spain and UK, that was it. Canada probably had the most connections, it connected to the UK, Australia, Kenya, Brazil and not the US, surprisingly, which was kind of interesting, right? And then when you get to 2005, 2009, there are a lot more connections, although they're still kind of separate. But when you get between 2010 and 2014, there's actually quite a lot of like the network is just it's just jumbled with lines, meaning that there are a lot of collaborations with various countries and all over the place, which is nice. So you do see that that increase, right? The highest production of artisanal fisheries articles from the institutions were University of British Columbia in Canada, of course, 30 articles, Ifomer, 16 articles, Duke University, 14 articles, Wildlife Conservation Society, 13 articles, James Cook University, 12 articles, Conseo, Superior, the Investagaciones, Cien tificas, 10 articles, World Fish, 10 articles, Pontific University, Pontificia University of Colletica, Chile, 9 articles, University of Exeter, 9 articles, and NOAA Fisheries, 9 articles. So institutions with higher productivity are as predicted, typically located in Europe and North America, followed by South America, Africa, and Oceana. So that's kind of interesting to see. And of course, you're looking at the same thing where you're looking at interactions between universities or institutions in 1973 and 2004, you're not seeing a lot of interactions. 2005, 2009, you're seeing a little bit more, and then 2010 to 2014, you're seeing a lot, a heck of a lot more, almost triple what was before. So really in conclusion, what they found was that they're, at the beginning, there definitely wasn't a huge interaction, international interaction. A lot of countries were on their own. The major developed countries would interact, UK, Canada, and the US. Brazil is not known to interact, except for lately they've been known to interact, which I think is interesting, apparently before it was very insular where a lot of the citation. So I should explain, before I go on to this, I should explain that when you read a journal you look at how high of an impact score it has. So the score I think is between 1 and 15, I'm not too sure. But each journal has an impact score, and the higher it is, the better the journal is considered. And they go up and down, depending on the cycle of the journal, depending on what kind of articles they put up, I don't know who determines it, but determines it, but somebody identifies them. So usually, in this article they're saying it tends that the major institutions and the developed countries tend to dominate those sort of articles because maybe they have more money for the quality of work, they can be more specific, I don't know, I'm not too sure. But the developed countries and the lower countries tend to go into lower impact journals, and not necessarily have the funds. And in 1973 to 2004, because the connection, there wasn't much of a globalization at that point, especially in science, a lot of countries kept themselves or just did work with neighbors, did collaborations with neighbors. So obviously the UK and Canada are not necessarily physical neighbors, but we have a definite tie. The US and Canada has a definite physical tie as well as sort of like that long term friendship kind of tie, that ally tie. So you see a lot of collaboration between there. And over time, you see more and more collaboration as technology allows us to interact more. You see a lot more people going to overseas to conferences or coming here from overseas to conferences. I'm here, I mean North America. You see a lot of interaction going on online. So of course, as technology builds, you see more scientists on social media and interacting and meeting with each other, they tend, as they talk more, just like if you meet somebody physically or in person, as they talk more, they're going to get more answers, right? Or they're going to get more interactive and they're going to collaborate more. So you're seeing more collaboration. But what the important part is of this collaboration, sorry, I'll get back to my point with Brazil. Brazil in the past has been very insular because, well, it just knows that a lot of them were citing themselves, citing either themselves or their colleagues. So they're only citing within the country. They weren't looking outside the country, which, you know, could be not the greatest thing in the world. You know, Brazil scientists are considered very good scientists. But it always helps to go beyond the borders and share information and share your knowledge and learn from others. And that's for any country developed or in development. You know, so it's one of those things where, you know, the more you collaborate internationally, the higher it's regarded. So you get into more high impact journals. So what the, what the conclusions of this article were was that, yes, it's dominated by developed countries, institutions and scientists from developed countries. The in development countries have to go through a period where they need to interact and collaborate with more of these developed countries, institutions, to get more of a name, to get their, their, get their information out there, to get more of an impact. Because when you have a higher impact than the journal article, and then that gets read or into a policy or read into regulations, it's more out to be read into regulation when one, it's from a valid source and it's from a very reputable source, such as high impact journals. And two, it's, you know, governments are going to make policies based on the research that are happening in their country. You know, yes, they will look at other research happening in other countries or other geographic areas. But really, they want to know what's happening in their area. So the more those countries and the scientists from those countries get out into the international market, the more they're going to be into high impact journals. Now to be honest, I just don't feel that, you know, I think it's, I think it's definitely a, a discriminatory, discriminatory thing. There's no reason why the science from developed, from developing countries should be different from developed countries. You know, the science is the same. The budgets might be different, but that shouldn't play a role, right, in the quality of work. So we should be looking at, you know, these, these scientists in developing countries who may not be able to travel as much, who may not be able to interact with other, other, other scientists from other countries, you know, may not get their work published or may not get their work seen by a lot of people, by the scientific community, which can be bad and by policy makers and whatnot, which may not may, which will get them away from being, like in a, you know, from being analyzed, from being surged and all that kind of stuff. So I think it's important that we look at this article and say, Hey, there's definitely an inequality here. And we need to bring that back up. One of those things that's already happening, as you saw from the data, and you'll see if you go to speak up for blue.com/134 session 134, you're going to see the show, you're going to see the article or the link to the article and you can look at the graphs in there and say, Hey, you know, as time increases and technology is getting better, we can actually interact with people all over the world, which we wouldn't be able to do because one, we didn't travel and two, we didn't have the internet, right? So now that the internet's coming on and people are understanding and we can connect with more people around the world in an instant, that's going to help with international collaboration for these countries. And I think it's going to help in actually validating their science because some people, they don't, if they look at the journal article that the research is in, that they're reading and they may see that it has a low impact score, they may just disregard it, not contact the author, maybe not collaborate or get to know the author. So it's very important. In this article, I know it wasn't a traditional article that we cover, you know, on animals and mapping and climate change and all that kind of stuff. But I still think it's important because this is what we need to look at. We want to make sure that, you know, overfishing happens everywhere in the world, in developed countries in the coast of developed countries and the coast of developing countries. And I think we need to really look at the data and what's happening in these developing countries and get some rules and regulations set around those, right? It's not going to be fun. It's not going to be easy, but we need the first starts with let's get the science and let's validate what we think is happening or disprove it, you know, that's what science is all about. The math tells you what you're looking at, you know, it tells you if your habitat is doing really well or it tells you if the habitat is doing well, or not doing well, and then it tells you if the habitat is doing okay, you know, so a lot of different things there. So this article is really good to get that out. When you got most of the fisheries, like the artisanal fisheries were aggregated institutions from developed countries such as the US, Canada, UK, Australian, France, you know, you got a problem there. There is definitely a pattern of dominance, but you know, when you look at Brazil coming on to the scene in other countries now and there's more of a globalization, there's more of a tie where, you know, there's more interaction. This article is one of them. It's Brazil in the UK, one guy from the UK, but there could have been more. And it's so it's very interesting in that respect. So anyway, that's the article for today. I thought it was interesting, you can, like I said, you can look at it, speakupforblue.com/session134. And I think it's an important article to look at the research behind the research of what's been done. I know it's kind of confusing, but it's extremely important to look at that because we want to make sure that it's unbiased. We want to make sure that we're representing, we're finding a representative of trends around the world and to make sure that those trends don't dip down further than they're already doing. We're talking about the number of fish that are around, the number of species that are around. We're definitely doing a number. We're definitely decimating all the, a lot of those species because we're overfishing. And usually it's because of commercial overfishing, but we don't know about the artisanal overfishing. Is there artisanal in from overfishing and then are we seeing it? You know, so you know, you normally wouldn't think they would be because they're not that baked. They don't have the huge boats and things like that where they can make a huge impact. However, they might be, who knows? They might be fishing all the time. I don't know. I have no idea how it works because we don't have the research on it. So I'm looking forward to seeing more research. I hope this paper gets out and more people see it and I think it's kind of cool. So you can also contact the authors. There's information on the authors, you know, through this website, through this PLSO1 and you can get that through our blog post. And I think it's just, I think it's good. I think that's what we're going to have to look forward to in the future is more artisanal fishing research from developing countries. So thank you for listening to the Speak Up for Blue Podcast. I really appreciate it. My name is Andrew, and I'm your host, Happy Thursday, Happy Conservation. [Music]
