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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Fisheries, Aquaculture and Living Resources
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1490894
This article is part of the Research Topic Fishery and aquaculture interdisciplinary integration to improve sustainable seafood production View all 3 articles

Ecological risk assessment of marine resources caught as bycatch in industrial bottom trawl shrimp fishery in the Amazon Continental Shelf

Provisionally accepted
Ualerson Peixoto Ualerson Peixoto 1,2*Miriana Sporcic Miriana Sporcic 3Alistair James Hobday Alistair James Hobday 3Bianca Bentes Bianca Bentes 1,2Rafaela Passarone Rafaela Passarone 4Flavia Lucena Fredou Flavia Lucena Fredou 4VICTORIA ISAAC VICTORIA ISAAC 1,2
  • 1 Federal University of Pará, Belém, Pará, Brazil
  • 2 Núcleo de Ecologia Aquática e Pesca da Amazônia - NEAP, Universidade Federal do Pará - UFPA, Belém, Brasil, Belém, Brazil
  • 3 CSIRO Enviroment, Hobart, Tasmania, Hobart, Australia
  • 4 Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture, Federal Rural University of Pernambuco, Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Ecological risk assessment (ERA) has been widely used to assess species' vulnerability to the impacts of fishing and then to prioritise any additional management actions to reduce impacts. The Ecological Risk Assessment for the Effects of the Fishing framework is based on a hierarchy of qualitative and semi-quantitative tools that work well in data-deficient situations. This study first used the Scale Intensity and Consequence (SICA) and Productive and Susceptibility Analyses (PSA) tools to evaluate the impacts of the industrial bottom trawl of southern brown shrimp on the Amazon Continental shelf in Northern Brazil. A total of 540 species were identified as having direct or indirect interaction with the trawls. The SICA identified that the main risk was related to fishing capture activities, potentially impacting the species' population size. Of the 47 species evaluated in the PSA, 12 displayed low vulnerability, 23 displayed moderate vulnerability, and 12 displayed high vulnerability to the impacts of fishing. Future fisheries management should focus on reducing species vulnerability by prioritising data collection for the most at-risk species. Also, fishing gear modification, such as bycatch exclusion devices (BRDs), should be employed to decrease the species' vulnerability.

    Keywords: Industrial fisheries, Productivity and Susceptibility Analysis, Amazon coast impacting the salinity, Nutrient levels, and sediments

    Received: 03 Sep 2024; Accepted: 08 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Peixoto, Sporcic, Hobday, Bentes, Passarone, Fredou and ISAAC. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Ualerson Peixoto, Federal University of Pará, Belém, 66075-110, Pará, Brazil

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.