Seasons as Temporal Units for Natural Resources Management: Perspective from Fishery Management in the Central Brazilian Amazon

Seasons, seen as temporal units, are important in the management of fisheries. They are defined differently by actors with specific spatial and institutional locations. In the case presented, we look at seasonality in Silves, a town in the Central Brazilian Amazon. We show how the state operates differently from local communities whose institutional arrangements evidence a more diverse kind of monitoring. We discuss how interannual variability in the Amazon Basin, increasing because of climate change, affects seasonality, and we describe three different types of seasons: Ecological, Local and Legal. We show how these different seasons interact, how closely they overlap and how they vary from year to year. We evaluate whether these variations are based on local people's real-time monitoring or forecasting. We show that the local strategies of resource users in Silves are adaptive and can bring faster short –term responses to interannual variability, but that they face obstacles from the more rigid legal systems used by the national government. These adaptive strategies should be incorporated into state-level management programs and regulations concerned with local and global environmental change.