Being social to understand fishery networks

To start of the third year of her PhD, Clara spent a month, from mid-November to mid-December 2019, at CSIRO as a visiting scientist (Hobart, Tasmania).

The objective for this collaboration between Murdoch University and CSIRO was to work on one of Clara’s PhD aims. Particularly, objective (ii), which aimed to understand how information sharing between fishery stakeholders might influence fisher behaviour. To do this for the blue swimmer crab fishery, Clara needs to firstly understand the social network structure of the fishery, and the flow of information among stakeholders forming the network. A commonly used approach to do this is social network analysis (SNA), a quantitative methodology employing graph theory and sociograms to analyse and visualize social relationships.

Because SNA is a very specific and quite complex method, Clara contacted Dr Ingrid van Putten (Research Scientist at CSIRO) earlier in her PhD with some enquiries on how to use this method, and asked for advice to design the survey. Dr van Putten is now a co-supervisor of Clara’s PhD, and will be the main collaborator in this PhD Chapter.

While being at CSIRO, Clara presented a 20 minute talk on the last results of her PhD. Particularly on the research on the social dimensions of the blue swimmer crab fishery. She presented the data on fishers concerns on the fishery, and supported management solutions, collected during three different field seasons in 2017, 2018 and 2019, recently published as two different papers (AMBIO & ICES).

The next steps on the SNA of the blue swimmer crab fishery will be to understand the influence that the social network structure has on information flow, and to compare information flow between stakeholder groups.

Watch this space for more information on Social Network Analysis!