Challenges for Standardizing Data Collection in Developing and Developed World

There is a growing trend to standardise field methods for sampling freshwater fishes in the developed world.  This brings considerable benefits for comparison between water bodies of a similar type or to assess the ecological health of the system.  This paper explores whether it is feasible to standardise methods in the developing world where the managers and scientists are faced with a different suite of issues, including large sizes of the rivers and lakes, extreme diversity of habitat types, extensive, highly dispersed exploitation by small scale fisheries, extremes of biodiversity, multiple gear methods, limited financial resources and capacity. This is compounded with several of the problems found the developed world such as institutional malaise, and country variation in methodologies and assessment objectives. The paper argues that standardisation in the developing world is currently impractical and not required until wider management objectives of inland fisheries are forthcoming.