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Coastal Forest Fisheries, Estuarine Livelihoods, and Human Well-being in Southern Puerto Rico

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Abstract

Estuaries and coastal forests, including the coastal fisheries they support, are among the most biodiverse and productive ecosystems on Earth. In Southern Puerto Rico (SPR), there is a culturally significant emic category of estuarine/coastal forest resource utilization known as “Pesca de monte” (tropical coastal forest fisheries, TCF fisheries hereafter) that constitute a parallel activity to commercial fisheries underreported in fishery statistics. Our three years of field research revealed that SPR communities derive considerable value from TCF resources, showing multiple engagements with these environments and wide-spectrum resource dependency. The value generated by TCF use includes the social and cultural acts of production and exchange in households, neighborhoods, and communities, whether the resources are sold, bartered, given as gifts, or consumed directly. Coastal policy that fails to protect productive TCF landscapes or hinders community access to these resources risks degrading human well-being around the coast. We discuss the implication of our findings for coastal policy in TCF fishery dependent regions such as SPR.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available to protect the confidentiality of ethnographic study participants. They are kept on the corresponding author’s personal repository at the University of Rhode Island. Aggregated or anonymized data can be made available by the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

  1. García-Quijano et al. (2013) found 45 out 97 residents reported receiving fish and other coastal resources as gifts and 97% of harvesters reported routine gift-giving.

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Acknowledgements

We are thankful for the collaboration of many southern coast Puerto Ricans who generously gave us their time and shared their knowledge and experience with us. Without their collaboration this research would not have been possible. The staff of Puerto Rico Sea Grant and of the Jobos Bay NERR provided unending advice and support in the field. We specially want to thank Ruperto Chaparro, Manuel Valdés-Pizzini, Lillian Ramírez, Michelle Schärer-Umpierre, and Angel Dieppa. We thank our dedicated student researchers, Dayanara Soto, Kevin Torres, Neysha Beltrán, Hernaliz Vazquez, Lorence Morell, and Aileen Santiago, from the University of Puerto Rico-Ponce, for their efforts during fieldwork. Alejandro Torres-Abreu, María Cruz-Torres, and the Ethnographic Field School at the UPR-Humacao also assisted our fieldwork. José A. Alvarado provided valuable help in our sampling and analysis.

Funding

This research was funded by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration- University of Puerto Rico Sea Grant (Project # UPR-2016-2017-006 – R/101-1-16).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, USA

    Carlos G. García-Quijano, Hilda Lloréns & John J. Poggie

  2. Department of Marine Affairs, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, USA

    Carlos G. García-Quijano & Hilda Lloréns

  3. Department of Coastal Studies, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA

    David C. Griffith

  4. Departamento de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Puerto Rico-Ponce, Ponce, Puerto Rico

    Miguel H. Del Pozo

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  1. Carlos G. García-Quijano
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Authors García-Quijano, Del Pozo, Griffith, and Lloréns contributed to data collection and all authors contributed to analysis. The first draft of the manuscript was written by García-Quijano and all authors contributed to subsequent versions. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Carlos G. García-Quijano.

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García-Quijano, C.G., Lloréns, H., Griffith, D.C. et al. Coastal Forest Fisheries, Estuarine Livelihoods, and Human Well-being in Southern Puerto Rico. Hum Ecol 51, 861–876 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-023-00449-2

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