Abstract
AbstractDespite the large number of marine recreational anglers in the United States, there exist few opportunities for individuals to contribute self‐reported effort and catch data directly to fisheries managers. Successfully implemented data collection programs based on self‐reported information have been able to provide scientists with additional indices for comparisons with existing fisheries data sets and to increase angler participation and confidence in the fisheries management process. Limitations to self‐reported data aside, the lack of a portable, electronic reporting device for the average angler has hindered development of new survey methods. We have developed a simple but fully customizable reporting method by which users can submit basic effort and catch information to an online database via text messages from mobile phones. To evaluate this new approach, we asked captains on behalf of six marine for‐hire operations to send a text message to document effort, catch, and disposition of catch by species at the completion of each for‐hire trip. Report submission was facilitated by RECTEXT, a compact syntax we developed to allow users to submit information within the technical limitations of a 160‐character text message framework. During the course of the 4.5‐month evaluation, participants submitted 128 trip‐level reports that described 1,957 finfish interactions. Results and feedback from participants indicate that the approach is easy to use, is cost efficient, and allows for real‐time reporting of information directly to an online database. In addition to the electronic angler diary application described here, we suggest that future evaluations of this approach be applied to tournament data collection, as the real‐time nature of reporting and the organized structure of tournaments may provide a mechanism to both interact with all registered anglers and facilitate design of an unbiased sampling protocol for validating the self‐reported data.
Highlights
Abstract.—Despite the large number of marine recreational anglers in the United States, there exist few opportunities for individuals to contribute self-reported effort and catch data directly to fisheries managers
The results of this study indicate that the text message based fisheries reporting system described here is capable of handling basic effort and catch information submitted directly from recreational anglers in the field and displaying that information in near real-time in a dedicated database
We chose to focus on marine recreational fisheries because of the relative lack of information available for many U.S marine stocks (NOAA Fisheries 2008a), additional syntaxes could be developed for freshwater fisheries applications as well as for many other volunteer environmental monitoring programs (USEPA 1998; Savan et al 2003)
Summary
Abstract.—Despite the large number of marine recreational anglers in the United States, there exist few opportunities for individuals to contribute self-reported effort and catch data directly to fisheries managers. We have developed a simple but fully customizable reporting method by which users can submit basic effort and catch information to an online database via text messages from mobile phones. To evaluate this new approach, we asked captains on behalf of six marine for-hire operations to send a text message to document effort, catch, and disposition of catch by species at the completion of each for-hire trip. Research has shown that structured angler self-reporting programs with backing by both users and survey administrators can provide an additional data source for fisheries management purposes (Pollock et al 1994; Cooke et al 2000; Loftus et al 2000) and include more anglers in the data collection process
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