Why BECCA was developed
The data-poor fisheries problem
Effective fisheries management usually needs information on catch, effort, abundance, size, species composition, fishing location, gear type, and change through 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 creates a major management problem. Without information, fisheries decline can go unnoticed. Local communities may observe change long before it appears in official records, but their knowledge is often not collected in a form that can influence decisions. BECCA was developed to address this gap.
The original development pathway
BECCA was first developed through work on flats fisheries in South Florida, especially bonefish, and later adapted to tarpon and permit. The original assessment was designed to create a standardised way of using local angler and guide knowledge to reconstruct long-term trends in fisheries where conventional data were limited. This development process had five stages.
The first stage was a review of the wider evidence base1. This review showed that Indigenous and local knowledge is increasingly recognised in fisheries science, but that most studies still collect it qualitatively. Few studies convert local knowledge into numeric indicators that can be analysed alongside fisheries data or used directly in assessment and management1. The same review identified a smaller group of studies that had asked fishers to recall best catches, largest individuals, catch rates, or past fishing conditions, creating a foundation for a more standardised BECCA protocol.
The second stage was information optimisation. Rather than assuming that only the oldest fishers or recognised experts should be interviewed, the project tested whether smaller but diverse groups could produce reliable estimates of fishery trends. This work supported a Wisdom of Crowds approach12,13. Small, diverse groups produced estimates of fishery quality that were similar to those from larger groups and from more experienced or homogeneous groups. In the bonefish optimisation work, a subsample of 66 respondents captured approximately 75% of unique responses, and even groups as small as 20 respondents produced relatively robust estimates in that specific fishery14.
The third stage was protocol design and beta testing. Questions were refined with recreational anglers and guides to ensure that the survey was understandable, not too long, and capable of producing usable numbers. The target survey length was approximately 10 to 15 minutes. Testing showed that questions needed to use language that fishers already use, such as sightings, shots, eats, hookups, and size, rather than forcing all fisheries into the language of conventional landing statistics.
The fourth stage was implementation. The approach was implemented for bonefish and later adapted for tarpon. In the bonefish assessment, fishers reported their best fishing days in terms of sightings and size. These data were standardised into sightings per unit effort and compared with independent tournament records, showing strong alignment with existing fisheries-dependent evidence3. In the tarpon assessment, the method was expanded beyond landed catch into encounter metrics such as eats and hookups, demonstrating that BECCA can be adapted for catch-and-release fisheries where fish are not necessarily harvested.
The fifth stage was manual development. This handbook builds from that process but broadens the method beyond flats fisheries so that it can be adapted for recreational, small-scale, subsistence, gleaning, invertebrate, trap, net, and traditional fisheries across a range of different habitats and contexts.