Understanding the economic and cultural values of fish populations using social questionnaire surveys

In monsoonal Asia where aquatic biodiversity is both challenging and resource limited, it is not uncommon to be faced with a complete lack of published records of fish biodiversity within a river. Such data are vital to screen for species of high  conservation concern and understand the ecological functionality of the habitats that are going to be impacted by water resource or hydropower development.

Local field staff conducting an interview with a fisherman on the Tadi Khola, Nepal

To overcome these knowledge gaps, BUG has been working with multiple stakeholders across India and Nepal to build an initial picture of regional species presence/absence, temporal trends in population status, and the economic and cultural values of different species.

In addition to providing an anecdotal yet invaluable overview of species present, these questionnaires have also been pivotal in identifying the locations of critical spawning and nursery habitats, migratory behaviours and seasonal movements, key anthropogenic threats, invasive species, and cultural values such as the use of various fish body parts for a wide range of medicinal uses.

By training local teams, BUG has been able to conduct many hundreds of interviews in extremely remote locations. In combination with the use of remote tools such as Google Earth, the resulting data from these interviews has been fundamental to informing temporal and spatial survey design and the development of Fisheries Monitoring Plans (FMP) to secure robust ecological baseline data.

Spatial location of 177 individual questionnaire surveys conducted across Nepal's Koshi River basin during 10 days in November 2023