The Tyler Prize and the Knowledge Infrastructure

Rashid Sumaila, my friend and colleague, and I shared the 2023 Tyler Prize (https://tylerprize.org/; see also Sumaila 2024, this issue). Although we worked together on many issues, we have received separate laudations. Mine mentioned that I contributed to creating a global “knowledge infrastructure,” besides publishing on various items, such as “shifting baselines.”

I will discuss this knowledge infrastructure here, because, despite its weird name, it concerns the readers of this journal, who I presume are predominantly fisheries biologists and managers, many of whom are working on inland fisheries in North America.

I called for a database of key traits of critical marine fishes in tropical waters in in the late 1980s, in a mercifully ignored strategic plan of the Manila-based International Centre for Living Aquatic Resources Management (now WorldFish, based in Malaysia), where I had ascended to become one of its four “Program Directors.” At the time, it was very difficult for people working in the tropics to acquire the information on the growth, natural mortality, and other traits of fishes required to manage fisheries based on the stock assessment models then in vogue. Hence, my suggestion was to extract information on key traits of about 200 commercial fish species from scientific papers and books and distribute this information to about 500 fisheries managers via 3.5-in diskettes (remember?) mailed to fisheries departments worldwide.

I arranged for a consultant from Germany to be hired to execute the project. This consultant was the then freshly minted Dr. Rainer Froese, who upon his arrival in Manila, immediately suggested that we should not cover just 200 fish species but 100 times more, i.e., all the 20,000 fish species then thought to have been described in the scientific literature.

Rainer and I set to work, designed the database around data that we knew existed, got grants to hire people to encode the available data (many colleagues design beautiful databases, then forget the encoding) and FishBase started in 1990…. Fast forward to the present: FishBase (www.fishbase.org) now covers more than 35,000 fish species, divided about 50/50 between the marine and freshwaters of the world. FishBase is also used by millions of people in all the world's countries (Humphries et al. 2023). It is indeed part of the world's knowledge infrastructure.

The United States is the country with most FishBase users, but has also many fisheries scientists, and ichthyologists, we have produced an immense amount of scientific literature of U.S. fishes. Relative to the scientific knowledge that has been generated in the last 200 years, FishBase coverage of U.S. water is not as good as it is for the southern hemisphere, European countries, or even the other two North American countries, Canada, and Mexico (the tiny archipelago southeast of Newfoundland that France still possess is well represented in FishBase, with 122 species, of which 111 are marine; Simian et al. 2022).

The utility to and the use of FishBase by American, Mexican, and Canadian researchers, especially those working on freshwater, thus should and will be improved by boosting its coverage of U.S. states, besides, obviously, that of Mexico and Canada, with which the USA share many fish species.

Thus, this is an appeal to American, Mexican, and Canadian researchers, particularly those colleagues working on freshwater fish and inland fisheries, to help us make FishBase more relevant to your needs and those of colleagues in North America. Please write me about this if you have a suggestion on how we could collaborate, or if you have smaller database, e.g., about the fishes in your state or province or territory, that could be used to enrich FishBase, and that would survive by being incorporated in FishBase (and remember that FishBase is a nonprofit).

Another component of the knowledge infrastructure for which I shared the Tyler Prize is the Sea Around Us, the research initiative named after a book authored by Rachel Carson, one of my scientific heroes, started with generous funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts in July 1999 at the University of British Columbia, which I joined in 1994.

The Sea Around Us is devoted to “Investigating the impact of fisheries on marine ecosystems and proposing policies to mitigate these impacts.” Although conceived as a global activity, the project first emphasized the data-rich North Atlantic as a test bed for developing its approaches, which rely on mapping of catch data and indicators of ecosystem health derived from the analysis of long catch time series data. Initial achievements included mapping the decline, throughout the North Atlantic basin, of high-trophic level fishes from 1900 to the present and the presentation of compelling evidence of change in the functioning of the North Atlantic ecosystems, summarized in a 2003 book.

The central and southern Atlantic were the next basins to be tackled, with emphasis on the distant-water fleet off West Africa, culminating in a major conference in Dakar, Senegal, in 2002. The project then emphasized the North Pacific, Antarctica, and marine mammals and the multiplicity of tropical Indo-Pacific fisheries before the Sea Around Us turned completely global, with all our major analyses and reports (e.g., on the interactions between marine mammals and fisheries, on fuel consumption by fleets, on the catches of small-scale fisheries, on subsidies to fisheries) being based on global studies (Pauly 2007).

The most arduous global questions tackled by the Sea Around Us was an estimation of the “real” marine fisheries catch of all the world's countries from 1950 to the near present, as opposed to the “official” catches reported annually by the member countries of the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Executing this project took us over 12 years and involved collaboration with over 300 colleagues in over 200 countries and their overseas territories to reconstruct global marine catches. For the USA, data kindly provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were key.

The results were published in 2016 in a scientific paper (Pauly and Zeller 2016a), an atlas (Pauly and Zeller 2016b), and on the Sea Around Us website (www.seaaroundus.org), where detailed annual marine catch data, and various derived indices are made freely available from the year 1950 to the near present, along with updates and corrections. The catch and related statistics we present, besides showing that indeed the total catch is, on average, about 50% higher than officially reported, are helpful to managers and scientists, especially in the southern hemisphere, who do not usually have access to the rich data sets generally available in countries of the northern hemisphere, including the USA. Indeed, our global mean underrepresentation of 50% is based on high underreporting, of up to 500% and more in some countries and territories of the southern hemisphere, and generally lower figures in the northern hemisphere, e.g., 10% for the USA.

Building on the successful reconstruction of global marine catches, the Sea Around Us has now embarked on the reconstruction of global inland fisheries. As was the case for the marine catch reconstruction, we rely mainly on graduate students and volunteers. We have completed preliminary results for one U.S. state (Minnesota), all Canadian provinces and territories, all countries of the African continent, and the 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Despite the approximate method we used for many countries, preliminary results suggest that the underrepresenting factor for inland fisheries is similar to that of marine fisheries, which we reconstructed in great detail. For the African continent, the reconstructed actual freshwater fisheries' catch is 2.6-times the reported annual catch against 2.4-times the marine fisheries around Africa. However, to our surprise, we found that for Canadian provinces and territories and the state of Minnesota, the underreporting factors are much higher (see Figure 1 for Quebec). This is due to (1) the enormous role of recreational fisheries and (2) the First Nations/Tribal fisheries, both of which are not officially reported to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

The reconstruction of Minnesota fisheries catches, which is being done in collaboration with Peter Sorensen of the University of Minnesota, is still tentative (a draft is available on request). However, it already suggests that the multiple recreational and “tribal” and even “commercial” data sets generated by different agencies in various states (and most of which are generally underestimated), will make the inland catch reconstruction of the remaining 49 U.S. states extremely difficult. However, we remain persuaded that this work will be helpful because a comprehensive view of the inland fisheries catch is necessary for any state that wants to understand the scale of its fisheries and to use that information to guide management.

Various straightforward methods have been developed for stock assessment for data-poor setting (notably by the above-mentioned R. Froese; Froese et al. 2023), but most of them require time series of reliable catch data. However, given the complexity that we were confronted with when attempting to reconstruct the total fisheries catch of Minnesota, we realize that—as was the case in our global reconstruction of marine fisheries catches, where we relied on the collaboration of colleagues based throughout the word—we will need the collaboration of colleagues in each of the remaining U.S. states.

Thus, and this is my second an appeal, it would be nice if U.S. colleagues working in academia or state regulatory agencies would join us in reconstructing the inland fisheries catches of their state. As we did for marine fisheries, we would provide a standard format. This involves the requirement that all reconstructions should start in 1950, even if the earlier data are very tentative, and provide for every year actual or interpolated tonnages (and if possible, the numbers of fish) for three types of fisheries: artisanal (often officially reported as commercial in the USA), recreational (i.e., including all fish that are retained or die after release), and tribal or Indigenous (whether the catch was for subsistence or was subsequently sold).

The resulting papers will obviously have collaborating colleagues as first authors and, depending on their reliability assessments, be either submitted to peer-reviewed journals (or other outlet), or be published as citable reports (like the report in which Figure 1 was originally published) that will be available through our website and archived by the University of British Columbia.

Getting an award such as the Tyler Prize is nice. Rashid Sumaila and I donated a chunk of our prize money to create a scholarship scheme that will bring young fisheries scientists and scholars from sub-Saharan Africa to the University of British Columbia for study stages so they also can contribute so the global knowledge infrastructure. Moreover, I think that besides sharing the joy, receiving a major award forces one to think bigger—even lots of laurels can't be piled up to make a comfortable place to rest. Thus, it would be nice if this essay, kindly invited by the Fisheries Editor-in-Chief Steven Cooke, were to start a collective effort to get a handle on the catch of the U.S. inland fisheries: this is definitely needed.