Going on and off the map: Lessons from Swedish fisher knowledge about spawning areas in the Baltic Sea

Scholars frequently promote fishers' rich understanding of marine environments as a legitimate and unique form of knowledge that must be accounted for in fisheries management. It is, however, challenging to combine fisher knowledge (FK) with the conventional scientific knowledge that fisheries management relies upon. In this paper we investigate the (in)commensurability between FK and scientific objectives and procedures. Towards this aim we performed interviews with a group of fishers who participated in an earlier Swedish study in which FK was used to map locations of fish spawning areas along the Swedish Baltic coast. By interviewing these fishers again we were able to identify and assess aspects of FK that were left implicit in the earlier study. Based on our results we discuss the value of these aspects of FK for understanding marine environments.