Low cost conservation: Fishing gear threats to marine species

Understanding conflicts between objectives of fisheries and conservation is the key to finding win-win situations for marine biodiversity and fishers. Many marine species are threatened by harmful interactions with fisheries, but the threats they face are associated with the fishing gear used. Here, we undertake a novel analysis of marine species and their gear-specific threats to evaluate conservation-fisheries trade-offs to identify areas with high competing goals. Our analysis suggests that gillnet and longline fisheries pose the greatest risk to marine species yet deliver relatively low profits, emphasizing the inefficiencies of these gears. We find that the majority of the high seas has low economic fisheries benefits with over 25% of the high seas categorized as areas of ‘conservation prioritisation’ over fisheries.