Freshwater ecosystems contribute substantially to the global fish catch. However, freshwater fisheries face growing human pressures and are underrepresented in global analyses and conservation strategies. Attempts to reconcile conservation and human welfare goals in fisheries have led to comanagement by the government and local communities, along with other stakeholders, but assessments of its effectiveness in freshwater fishe...

Species of the genus Pseudoplatystoma, the long-whiskered catfishes, are important in commercial and recreational fisheries in South America, and some species have become key to regional aquaculture. Some species of the genus are under pressure due to overfishing and the negative impacts of dams. Six questions are asked in this review: (i) What species are in the genus, and where are they distributed? (ii) What are the life hi...

In the present study a unique dataset on population abundance in various community‐based management ( CBM ) and non‐ CBM areas is analysed to address the question of whether CBM can recover overexploited populations of Arapaima sp. in river‐floodplain ecosystems. All non‐ CBM areas possessed depleted Arapaima sp. populations with a mean density of 0·01 individuals ha −1 . Arapaima sp. population densities in all CBM areas chan...

Winter precipitation increases as much as seven times from south to north along the US Pacific coast. For 1948–95, nine coastal grid points are used to identify spatial and temporal winter precipitation variations and to assess atmospheric circulation influences on precipitation variability. A strong negative correlation to the northwest of each precipitation grid point is revealed by one‐point correlation maps of precipitatio...