The COVID-19 pandemic has led to environmental recovery in some ecosystems from a global “anthropause,” yet such evidence for natural resources with extraction or production value (e.g., fisheries) is limited. This brief report provides a data-driven global snapshot of expert-perceived impacts of COVID-19 on inland fisheries. We distributed an online survey assessing perceptions of inland fishery pressures in June and July 2020 to basin-level inland fishery experts (i.e., identified by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations across the global North and South); 437 respondents from 79 countries addressed 93 unique hydrological basins, accounting for 82.1% of global inland fish catch. Based on the responses analyzed against extrinsic fish catch and human development index data, pandemic impacts on inland fisheries 1) add gradation to the largely positive environmental narrative of the global pandemic and 2) identify that basins of higher provisioning value are perceived to experience greater fishery pressures but may have limited compensatory capacity to mitigate COVID-19 impacts along with negative pressures already present.

Inland fisheries and their freshwater habitats face intensifying effects from multiple natural and anthropogenic pressures. Fish harvest and biodiversity data remain largely disparate and severely deficient in many areas, which makes assessing and managing inland fisheries difficult. Expert knowledge is increasingly used to improve and inform biological or vulnerability assessments, especially in data-poor areas. Integrating expert knowledge on the distribution, intensity, and relative influence of human activities can guide natural resource management strategies and institutional resource allocation and prioritization. This paper introduces a dataset summarizing the expert-perceived state of inland fisheries at the basin (fishery) level. An electronic survey distributed to professional networks (June-September 2020) captured expert perceptions (n = 536) of threats, successes, and adaptive capacity to fisheries across 93 hydrological basins, 79 countries, and all major freshwater habitat types. This dataset can be used to address research questions with conservation relevance, including: demographic influences on perceptions of threat, adaptive capacities for climate change, external factors driving multi-stressor interactions, and geospatial threat assessments.

The Amazon Basin is the largest in the world and for many of its inhabitants fishing is a crucially important source of food and income. However, the benefits derived from mostly informal, part time, seasonal, and subsistence-based activities such as fishing are largely invisible to policy-makers, and addressing the threats to aquatic habitats, ecosystem functioning, and fisheries is frequently given low priority in national development agendas. To estimate the total extraction of fish in the Amazon Basin, we reviewed various publications and databases with quantitative data related to the landings, trade, and consumption of fish. We estimated the total landings to be between 422,000 and 473,000 t yr-1 in live weight, near to previous estimates. Almost 75%, however, represented landings in the Brazilian part of the basin, and there is a very large margin of uncertainty given that, among other issues, there are no recent official statistics on commercial landings. Conversely, landings in Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador seem to be considerably higher than previously thought. In all Amazonian countries, from 50% up to almost 100% of the fishing takes place for personal consumption, implying that it is not recorded in official landing statistics. Available time series data indicate that fish consumption in Brazil, as well as commercial fish landings in Peru and Colombia, have declined in recent years. Local case studies, national household consumption and expenditure surveys (HCES), and market surveys, all have their benefits and drawbacks. Some minor modifications of HCES procedures could considerably improve their usefulness for estimating fish landings in the Amazon Basin. To improve such estimates, we propose that local case studies be used to calibrate HCES data, thus combining the high precision of local case studies with the wide coverage and representativity of HCES data

The report provides detailed information such as distribution, feeding, size, population structure of 40 key species which are significant in the Mekong River fishery.