Vulnerability assessment of shrimp fishery species in the tropical atlantic marine ecosystem

Bottom trawling for shrimp is economically important in Brazil, but it raises major conservation concerns due to the substantial bycatch it generates. Information gaps for non-target species remain a key barrier to effective mitigation and management. We assessed the vulnerability of 81 target and bycatch species caught by industrial, semi-industrial, and artisanal fleets along the North and Northeast Brazilian coast. We applied a Productivity Susceptibility Analysis (PSA), deriving productivity from life-history traits and susceptibility from interactions with fishery species. To better represent cumulative exposure, we aggregated susceptibility across areas using worst-case (FGI) and cumulative (AS) metrics, and compared PSA patterns with complementary information from data-poor approaches (MSY) and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) status. Target shrimp species were generally classified as moderate risk across areas and fishing scales. In contrast, twenty-eight bycatch species were classified as high risk, including nine elasmobranchs, five catfishes, and seven sciaenidae, with vulnerability linked to low productivity and high susceptibility, since trawling overlaps essential habitats for early life stages. Notably, under data-limited bycatch conditions, PSA identified moderate or high vulnerability for 49 species assessed as Least Concern by the IUCN, indicating that a low extinction risk does not preclude fishery-specific impacts. Cumulative aggregation further increased vulnerability for many taxa relative to the worst-case scenario, showing that moderate pressures across multiple areas can translate to a high overall risk. These findings prioritize bycatch mitigation, especially for elasmobranchs, and support expanding testing and adoption of bycatch reduction devices in Brazilian shrimp trawl fisheries.