Fee-fishing operations developed recently in Brazilian agricultural scenery in a rather disordered manner. This study, carried out at the northwest region of São Paulo State, Brazil, focuses on the productive performance of fee-fishing system. Several visits were made monthly to nine fee-fishing establishments, for six months. A questionnaire by owners targeting 13 indicators of the operation's productive performance. Data were submitted to multivariate analysis (MANOVA), principal component analysis (PCA) and cluster analysis. MANOVA indicated significant differences between the fee-fishing operations. The PCA analyses indicated, from the higher coefficient eigenvectors, three attributes for the lakes, such as productive system, fishery management and operational administration. The cluster analyses classified the fishing lakes in four groups. The indicators angler frequency (AF), stocking density (SD), stocking biomass (SB), total capture (TC) and capture/lake/day (CLD), which are part of the attribute productive system, were the most important indicators of "fee-fishing" operations performance in this study.
fish; multivariate analyses; productive system; lakes
