A Best Catch Assessment (BECAA) is a standardised local knowledge survey that asks fishers or harvesters to report numeric information about their best remembered catch or fishing events. A BECAA records the amount caught or encountered, the year in which the event occurred, the effort required, the fishing method used and the place or fishing area.
Effective fisheries management usually depends on information regarding catch, fishing effort, abundance, individual size, species composition, fishing location, gear type and trends over time. In many places, this information is missing. Fisheries may be too dispersed, informal, small-scale, remote, or under-resourced to support conventional monitoring. In some recreational and catch-and-release fisheries, fish are not landed, which means harvest records are not available. In gleaning and subsistence fisheries, catches may be eaten at home, shared, bartered, or traded locally, so they never enter formal reporting systems.
This can create a major management problem. Without consistent numeric information, fishery declines can go unnoticed. Local communities may observe change long before it appears in official records, but their knowledge is often not collected in a way that it can influence decisions. The Best Catch Assessment (BECAA) was developed to address this gap.
The BECAA is a practical method for collecting quantitative local knowledge in data-poor fisheries. The BECAA Handbook is intended to provide a “how to” guide for documenting long-term change in fisheries using information held by fishers, harvesters, guides, gleaners, divers and other local knowledge holders.
Access the Handbook and learn more about BECAA here.
