Organisation Ecotourisique du Lac Oguemoué (OELO) established an ecotourism project on Lake Oguemoué in 2011 to provide alternative employment and income generating opportunities to the traditional hunting and fishing practices which dominate in the region. Through this project OELO has developed and supported other biodiversity conservation programmes in the greater Bas Ogooué Ramsar Site. During these projects and the associated community engagements, OELO became aware of the reported deterioration in the Oguemoué Lake fishery which was a cause of concern to local residents. The lakeside communities reported declining catches and fish size as well as a shift to active fishing methods. In order to assist with the future management of the Lake, OELO developed a Sustainable Fishing Programme established in 2012. In 2013 the first proposed management agreement, “Our Lake, Our Future”, was drafted, agreed to, and signed by 50 fishers from the villages and fishing camps on the shores of Lake Oguemoué. Although the concept was agreed to and comprised valid approaches to improve fisheries (including minimum mesh sizes, ceasing use of monofilament nets, establishment of no-take protected areas, halting active fishing and the removal of ‘ghost’ fishing gear), implementation was poor due to logistical and political constraints. OELO’s Sustainable Fishing Programme gained the support of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in 2014. With assistance from these two organisations, the fishers organised themselves into two fishing associations representing the northern and southern sections of the Lake.

 
TNC appointed Aquatic Ecosystem Services (AES) to prepare a Situational Assessment of the Fish and Fisheries of Lake Oguemoué in November 2018. The purpose of the Situational Assessment was to obtain baseline data for future monitoring and evaluation of the fishery to assess whether the Fisheries Management Plan (FMP) contributes to improved catches in the future. The baseline data encompasses both Fisheries Independent Surveys (FIS) and Fisheries Dependent Survey (FDS) data, with the latter component building on the work done by OELO over the previous years.

Two fisheries independent sampling surveys were undertaken, the first coinciding with the long rains (April 2019) and the second during the dry season (August 2019). The FIS was designed to be repeatable spatially and temporally within the Oguemoué Lake and allowed for the generation of long-term temporal trends in key fishery indicators. These indicators provide the basis for on-going monitoring and evaluation of indicators of the state of the fishery. Purpose-built survey equipment was used to sample the full species composition and size spectrum of ichthyofauna present. This allows for a scientifically based, repeatable and robust assessment of the status of the fish populations to be undertaken independently of the fishery itself.

For the FDS component, AES designed a tablet based electronic Catch Assessment Survey (eCAS) to track changes in characteristics of the fishery through structured, standardised questionnaires with fishers. This was developed to align with existing fisheries dependent survey data collected by OELO in previous years. The tablet eCAS system allows for offline data collection and data syncing to a cloud based platform when network access allows. The data is maintained in a database which allows partners to easily access key reporting indicators.

This project represents the first large-scale long-term fisheries monitoring programme on any of the Bas Ogooué Ramsar Site lakes.