The fishery performance indicators for global tuna fisheries.

We characterize the ecological, economic, and community performance of 21 major tuna fisheries, accounting for at least 77% of global tuna production, using the Fishery Performance Indicators. Our analysis reveals that the biggest variations in performance among tuna fisheries are driven by the final markets that they target: international sashimi market tuna fisheries considerably outperform a comparison set of 62 non-tuna fisheries in the Fishery Performance Indicator database, international canned tuna market fisheries perform similarly to the comparison set, and tuna fisheries supplying local markets in coastal states considerably underperform the comparison set. Differences among regional fishery management organizations primarily reflect regional species composition and market access, despite stark variation in governance, management, and other enabling conditions.

The fishery performance indicators: a management tool for triple bottom line outcomes.

Pursuit of the triple bottom line of economic, community and ecological sustainability has increased the complexity of fishery management; fisheries assessments require new types of data and analysis to guide science-based policy in addition to traditional biological information and modeling. We introduce the Fishery Performance Indicators (FPIs), a broadly applicable and flexible tool for assessing performance in individual fisheries, and for establishing cross-sectional links between enabling conditions, management strategies and triple bottom line outcomes. Conceptually separating measures of performance, the FPIs use 68 individual outcome metrics--coded on a 1 to 5 scale based on expert assessment to facilitate application to data poor fisheries and sectors--that can be partitioned into sector-based or triple-bottom-line sustainability-based interpretative indicators.