What is BECCA?

Definition

A Best Catch Assessment (BECCA) is a standardised local knowledge survey that asks fishers or harvesters to report numeric information about their best remembered catch or fishing events. A BECCA 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.

At its simplest, BECCA asks four linked questions. What was your best catch or best fishing day in the current year? What was your best catch or best fishing day in the best year of your fishing life? What was your best catch or best fishing day in the year that you started fishing? How many hours, people, gears, traps, nets, or other effort units were involved?

The most important rule is that each answer must include both a number and a year. The number might be fish caught, fish seen, shots, eats, hookups, kilograms, pounds, baskets, sacks, bags, bushels, buckets, shells, crabs, or another locally meaningful unit. The year might be 1989, 2003, 2025, or any other year the respondent can remember. Without both a number and a year, the response cannot be used to reconstruct change through time.

A useful BECCA response is not “there were lots of fish when I was young”. A useful BECCA response is “in 1989, my best day was 65 fish in about six hours”. The first statement gives context. The second creates data.

The core BECCA idea

Fishers often remember exceptional fishing events. They remember the day they caught more than usual, the biggest fish, the most productive tide, the best season, the year when fishing was clearly better than it is now, or the place where fishing suddenly changed. These memories are not random stories. They often anchor long-term experience and can reveal how fisheries have changed across decades.

BECCA takes these memories and records them in a structured way. Instead of asking only whether fishing has become “better” or “worse”, BECCA asks how many were caught, how large they were, how many hours were spent fishing, what gear was used, and what year the event happened. This makes it possible to calculate effort-standardised indicators such as fish per hour, kilograms per hour, baskets per person-hour, trap catch per day, shots per standard fishing day, eats per unit effort, hookups per unit effort, or maximum size by year.

The approach is grounded in a simple proposition: a fisher’s best remembered fishing experience can act as an index of the underlying abundance and size structure of a fishery at that point in time. Individual memories can be imperfect, but when many memories are collected consistently, standardised by effort, and aggregated carefully, they can reveal long-term population signals that formal monitoring may have missed¹¹.

What BECCA is useful for

BECCA is most useful when a fishery has little or no formal long-term data. It can help communities and managers understand whether current catches are lower than remembered historical catches, whether fishers now need to work longer for the same catch, whether the size of fish or invertebrates has changed, whether different places show different trajectories, and whether local knowledge points to management concerns that need further investigation.

BECCA can be applied to recreational fisheries, commercial fisheries, small-scale fisheries, subsistence fisheries, gleaning, invertebrate harvesting, diving fisheries, trap fisheries, handline fisheries, net fisheries, and multi-species fisheries. Its first named applications have been in South Florida bonefish and tarpon fisheries, but the logic is much broader. Previous studies have used closely related best-catch questioning in the Gulf of California, the Red Sea, Brazil, the Philippines, Portugal, and other data-poor fisheries, even where the method was not yet named as BECCA^4-10.

What BECCA is not

BECCA is not a conventional stock assessment. It does not directly estimate total biomass, recruitment, fishing mortality, or maximum sustainable yield unless combined with other data and models. It does not remove the need for landing surveys, biological monitoring, participatory mapping, underwater surveys, fisher logbooks, market surveys, or ecological research.

BECCA is also not a casual perception survey. It should not rely only on vague statements such as “there used to be more fish” or “the fish were bigger before”. These statements are important context, but BECCA only works when responses are converted into numbers linked to years and fishing effort. It is therefore best understood as a structured, quantitative local knowledge method. It generates indicators of change, not absolute certainty.