Core principles of BECCA
Number, year, effort
The foundation of BECCA is simple. Every usable response needs a number, a year, and an effort measure. The number describes what was caught, seen, hooked, harvested, or collected. The year places that event in time. The effort measure allows comparison between people, gears, places, and years.
A BECCA response should look like this:
“In 1989, my best day was 65 fish.”
or:
“In 2004, I collected 3 sacks in one day.”
or:
“In 2012, my best day was 18 hookups.”
or:
“In 1995, I harvested about 25 kg in 6 hours.”
The number and year are the foundation of the method.
A fisher who caught 20 fish in two hours had a different fishing day from someone who caught 20 fish in ten hours. A gleaner who collected two buckets alone in three hours had a different experience from a household group collecting two buckets over a full day. A trap fisher using 10 traps cannot be compared directly with a trap fisher using 100 traps unless the number of traps and soak time are recorded.
The minimum effort variable is the number of hours fished or harvested in a day. Where relevant, BECCA should also record the number of people involved, the number of gears used, the number of traps, the number of hooks, net length, soak time, number of hauls, number of dives, or any other local effort unit that strongly affects catch.
Current and past together
BECCA works because it anchors the present against remembered historical baselines. Every survey must ask about the best catch in the current year. This is mandatory. Every survey must also ask either about the respondent’s best ever catch or about the best catch in the year they started fishing. The strongest version asks all three.
The current-year question tells us what the fishery looks like now. The best-ever question identifies the point in a respondent’s experience when fishing was most productive. The first-year question helps place each fisher’s personal baseline in time and is especially useful for detecting shifting baselines across generations.
Use locally meaningful units
Fishers and harvesters do not always speak in kilograms. They may speak in baskets, buckets, bags, sacks, bundles, boxes, coolers, strings, plates, trays, bushels, or boatloads. In recreational fisheries they may speak in shots, follows, eats, hookups, landed fish, or fish weight. These units should not be dismissed. They are often the units by which the fishery is actually remembered, shared, traded, and managed locally.
The role of BECCA is to record the local unit clearly and then standardise it where possible. If someone says they collected three sacks, the interviewer should ask what type of sack, whether that sack is a common local size, whether it varies by species, and approximately how many individuals or how much weight a full sack represents. The aim is not to erase local measurement systems. The aim is to document them clearly enough that they can be analysed.
Record the local unit, then ask follow-up questions to standardise it.
For example: - “How many fish are usually in one basket?”
“How many kilograms does one full sack usually weigh?”
“How many crabs fit in one bucket?”
“What size is the bag you are referring to?”
“Is that a household bucket, market bucket, rice sack, feed sack, or another type?”
Match the metric to the fishery
The best BECCA metric is the one that fishers can report accurately and consistently. In some fisheries this will be number of fish. In others it will be weight. In gleaning fisheries it may be buckets or baskets. In trap fisheries it may be catch per trap per day. In sight-based recreational fisheries it may be shots, eats, or hookups rather than landed fish. In single-species fisheries, size is often critical, because changes in maximum size can reveal changes in population structure even when catch rates are unclear.
The metric should be familiar, countable, linked to a specific year, linked to effort, and comparable across respondents after standardisation.