Cultural importance of marine resources subject to fishing exploitation in coastal communities of Southwest Gulf of Mexico
Introduction
Fishing is a fundamental component in many countries' economies because it contributes considerably to society's food security and well-being, especially for low-income populations (FAO, 2010). Mexican fisheries, particularly artisanal fisheries from Veracruz, create employment and provide food for over forty thousand fishers and their families (CONAPESCA, 2017). Fishing in Veracruz dates back to pre-Hispanic times, and many of the ecosystems that support it are part of the Reef Corridor of the Southwest Gulf of Mexico (Ortiz-Lozano et al., 2013). Three well-defined areas conform this reef corridor: Sistema Arrecifal Lobos-Tuxpan (SALT), Sistema Arrecifal Veracruzano (SAV), and a set of small reef off the coast of Los Tuxtlas Biosphere Reserve called Arrecifes de Los Tuxtlas (AT) (Ortiz-Lozano et al., 2013). There are also scattered patches of submerged reefs between the main systems (Ortiz-Lozano et al., 2018).
The ecological corridor approach is key to recognize the connectivity between all reefs along the coast of Veracruz (Ortiz-Lozano et al., 2013) as well as its contribution to the wellbeing of coastal populations both economically and socially. Establishing the corridor as a network of marine protected areas would allow the inclusion of various stakeholder interests involved in natural resource management and conservation (Callum et al., 2011) to meet ecological goals more effectively and comprehensibly than any individual Marine Protected Area (MPA) could by themselves (CMAP & UICM, 2007).
The reef corridor reduces the intensity of extreme hydro-meteorological phenomena protecting the coast and the associated urban infrastructure, allowing economic activities such as tourism and maritime trade to develop. Despite the reef corridor's importance, its resources are continually perturbed by coastal water pollution, biodiversity loss, sewage discharge, unplanned urban growth, overfishing (Granados-Barba et al., 2015), navigation, and lately port expansion projects (Valadez-Rocha and Ortiz-Lozano, 2013). Due to the importance of their coral reef ecosystems, SAV, and SALT are part of Mexico's National Protected Areas (NPA), SAV as a National park and SALT as a Flora and Fauna Protection Area. The Natural Protected Areas Commission (CONANP) proposed AT as NPA in 2018, but it has not been an official resolution.
Despite management efforts being encouraging, public support is vital for conservation success, which will happen only when the nature and goals of conservation efforts are widely known, understood, and accepted (Booth et al., 2009), making it easier for communities to assume responsibility for compliance with the management strategies (Caballero-Cruz et al., 2016).
Communication among governmental institutions and local resource user communities is crucial for avoiding conflicts between the community's perceptions, needs, desires, and management strategies (Ciocănea et al., 2016). Issues worsen when implemented management strategies, such as MPA, express most management issues in ecological imperatives (Fiske, 1992), leaving out how local communities relate to natural resources and their social context (Voyer et al., 2012). Most reef research focuses on the ecological dimension of reef ecosystems, leaving aside the human one, limiting the understanding of society's relations with these ecosystems, as well as potential reef recovery solutions (Kittinger et al., 2012) and increasing fishing communities well-being.
Integrating fishers a their knowledge into marine resources management and conservation strategies is a necessary action properly orient them and to increase their rate of success (Rossiter and Levine, 2014), many studies, from fishers perception of fishing grounds (Hamel et al., 2018), to fishers knowledge and behavior combined with geographic information systems (Aswani and Lauer, 2006), have been carried to include fishers and their knowledge in the design and place of marine reserves.
Human-environment relations complexity makes it critical to examine conservation issues using socio-cultural approaches. It is important to emphasize that nature and culture converge at many levels through values, societal beliefs, norms, customs, livelihoods, knowledge, practices, and appropriation (Pilgrim et al., 2009; Voyer et al., 2012).
In this context, fisher's knowledge (FK) is important because it comprises experimental knowledge, including various aspects of their reality, such as the ecological, social, and economical ones. This knowledge is developed in a social-cultural and geographical context (Fischer et al., 2015) linking fishing communities' culture to a particular marine ecosystems and its available associated species (McGoodwin, 2001); and could be passed down from generation to generation (Chapman, 2007; Schafer and Reis, 2008; Solís Rivera et al., 2011).
The cultural importance of a resource is shaped by community characteristics (generation, gender, and occupation) (Lawrence et al., 2005; Pagaza-Calderón et al., 2006; Phillips and Gentry, 1993), resource characteristics, frequency of use, variations in the way it is used, traditional uses and its potential as economic or subsistence resource (González-Insuasti and Caballero, 2007). Cultural importance is affected by socio-cultural, economic and political factors and processes beyond user control (Pagaza-Calderón et al., 2006; Pinedo et al., 2002).
This study aims to measure the cultural importance of the reef corridor species subject to fishing exploitation in the communities of Veracruz's state, Mexico; allowing to understand resource appropriation and uses, as well as differences in uses at community and regional level, and its relation with regional socio-economic characteristics. This approach makes it possible to design management strategies for the reef corridor resources to be in consonance with the communities that use them.
In this paper, a species’ cultural importance is considered as the role it plays within a particular culture (Garibay-Orijel et al., 2007; Ignatius et al., 2019; Ignatius and Haapasaari, 2018) understood here as the number of mentions of exploited marine species and the different uses they are subjected to.
To measure cultural importance, we used a cultural importance index based on ethnobotany; and sough, through a consensus with the informants, to identify the role that a species plays in its day to day (Albuquerque et al., 2006; Tardío & Pardo-de-Santayana, 2016). These indexes summarize the information of a complex system of traditions and resources uses into numerical scales or values by taxon (Gheno-Heredia et al., 2011).
Indexes of cultural importance have been used to a large extent in ethnobotany on terrestrial species (e.g., Ávila-Nájera et al., 2011; Garibay-Orijel et al., 2007; Gheno-Heredia et al., 2011; Pagaza-Calderón et al., 2006), to evaluate lexical retention of plant names and differentiation of key cultural species (e.g., Garibaldi and Turner, 2004; Turner, 1988) as well as the differences among ethnic groups knowledge (e.g., Bone Lajones and Lema Tapias, 1999; Pagaza-Calderón et al., 2006). Studies incorporating indicators of cultural importance have rarely been conducted on marine species, two studies can be mentioned (Medeiros et al., 2018; Rocha et al., 2012).
In this paper we present our findings regarding the cultural value of exploited marine species of the reef corridor on ten communities of the state of Veracruz, Mexico; their uses and its relation with fishers’ socio-economic characteristics.
Section snippets
Study area
The study was conducted in ten coastal communities in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. Four on this communities are placed north of the state (Tamiahua - TAM, Barra de Corazones - BCO, Tuxpan de Rodríguez Cano – TUX y Tecolutla – TEC), three on the center (Barra de Chachalacas – BCH, Boca del Río – BRI y Antón Lizardo – ANL) and three on the south (Fig. 1).
All studied communities are in front of the submerged and emerged reefs of the reef corridor and have access to their natural resources. This
Fishers basic characteristics
Two hundred and ten fishers were part of the study, 85 from the north zone, 83 from the central zone, and 42 from de south zone. Table 2 list the total participants for each community. The ages of participants ranged from 19 to 89 years old, with an average of 45 years old; out of the 210, two are women the rest were men. ZAP, ARR and BRI were the only communities were indigenous people participated in the study (Table 2), particularly popoluca, nahuatl and zapoteca.
Regarding education level,
Discussion
The low cultural value for each taxon at state, zone, and community scale is a consequence of the few variations of use for each marine taxon and how often they were mentioned. For instance, C. poeyi and T. carolinus were mentioned by all fishers in Zapotitlán and Los Arrecifes but had a low CVe, compared to the maximum possible value for this study, which is four since four variations of use were considered since both taxa are used only for food and sales.
It is important to note that low
Conclusion
Based on CVe it is possible to state that the reef corridor resources show low cultural value at individual species level. However, based on the variations of use in which communities appropriate these resources, or the ways in which they are used (food, sales, decoration, handicrafts, medicinal and ritual), these resources are immersed in their everyday life, sustenance and development, proving their cultural importance.
Although this study focused on the cultural importance of the reef
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgment
Thanks to all fishers in the studied communities for their time during our surveys, and the PhD program of the Instituto de Ciencias Marinas y Pesquerías of the Universidad Veracruzana for making this research possible. The first author received a grant from the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT) scholarship 259287. This research is part of the DGI project: 32720201692 “The Reef Corridor of the Southwest Gulf of Mexico” partially founded by The Centro Mexicano de Derecho
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