Objective The vessel logbook program in the northeastern United States provides records of angler participation on for-hire recreational fishing trips, which are used to produce official estimates of marine recreational catch. We evaluate whether the number of anglers reported per trip in logbooks varies systematically with the presence or absence of fishery-independent angler intercept (creel) surveying.Methods We employed matching methods to compare logbook-reported anglers-per-trip counts between headboat trips that were intercept surveyed and observationally similar headboat trips that were not intercept surveyed. To account for the nonrandom nature of intercept sampling, we made these comparisons between trips that were equally likely to be intercept surveyed based on the stratified random sampling framework used for assigning intercept samplers to specific headboat vessel trips.Results Analysis of 11 years of headboat logbook data revealed that angler intercept surveying led to between 1.61 and 1.65 additional anglers per trip being reported. This corresponds to a misreporting rate of between 3.24% and 3.92% and translates to an average of 19,523 to 23,580 unreported angler trips annually across all northeastern U.S. headboat operations.Conclusions Our analysis identifies a novel source of measurement error in a key recreational fisheries data stream and offers a framework to account for the error in both historical and ongoing data collection efforts. Surveying recreational anglers aboard for-hire fishing vessels may unintentionally influence how vessel operators subsequently report trip details in logbooks.

The development of offshore wind energy in the United States necessitates a sound understanding of trade-offs across ocean uses. Location data on private recreational fishing have been a glaring gap in understanding how society uses marine resources, despite its economic importance. In this study, we use a novel data set to start to fill that knowledge gap. We employ a flexible restricted likelihood spatial scan statistic on data from Fish Rules, a smartphone application, which provides georeferenced species-level regulations, to understand whether species-level data of user queries are clustered spatially. Originally developed for epidemiological studies of disease clusters, the flexible scan statistic employed in this study uses a Bernoulli likelihood ratio test to assess the size, number, and significance of clusters in presence/absence data for recreational species. We use a second data set of known fishing locations to validate that the clusters identify private recreational fishing activity. We then discuss the analysis in the context of wind lease areas in the region, highlighting its value in supporting management decision-making. The results suggest that Fish Rules data identify areas with a high likelihood of being private angler fishing locations and can assess differential impacts of offshore wind development on private recreational fishing activities.

Recreational fishing (RF) is a large yet undervalued component of fisheries globally. While progress has been made in monitoring, assessing, and managing the sector in isolation, integration of RF into the management of multi-sector fisheries has been limited, particularly relative to the commercial sector. This marginalises recreational fishers and reduces the likelihood of achieving the sector's objectives and, more broadly, achieving fisheries sustainability. We examined the nature and extent of RF inclusion in harvest strategies (HSs) for marine fisheries across 15 regions in 11 nations to define the gap in inclusion that has developed between sectors. We focused on high-income nations with a high level of RF governance and used a questionnaire to elicit expert knowledge on HSs due to the paucity of published documents. In total, 339 HSs were considered. We found that RF inclusion in HSs was more similar to the small-scale sector (i.e., artisanal, cultural, or subsistence) than the commercial sector, with explicit operational objectives, data collection, performance indicators, reference points, and management controls lacking in many regions. Where specified, RF objectives focused on sustainability, economic value and catch allocation rather than directly relating to the recreational fishing experience. Conflicts with other sectors included competition with the commercial sector for limited resources, highlighting the importance of equitable resource allocation policies alongside HSs. We propose that RF be explicitly incorporated into HSs to ensure fisheries are ecologically, economically, and socially sustainable, and we recommend that fisheries organisations urgently review HSs for marine fisheries with a recreational component to close the harvest strategy gap among sectors.

Understanding how recreational angling effort responds to regulatory adjustment is important for rebuilding overfished stocks such as Atlantic striped bass Morone saxatilis. In this paper, we use stated preference choice experiment data to evaluate how individual angler participation may respond to changes in fishing trip characteristics, particularly the number of small, medium-sized, and trophy striped bass kept and released. We use these results to simulate the aggregate effect of alternative fishing policies in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut on angler welfare, angler effort, recreational fishing mortality, and female spawning stock biomass (SSB). We find that a wide range of economically efficient policies are available if the primary management objective is to control recreational fishing mortality. In contrast, we find that the range of efficient policies is quite narrow if the primary management objective is to protect female SSB. Additionally, only one of the 36 alternative policies analyzed; a one-fish harvest slot of 28″ to 36″, is expected to achieve a non-trivial reduction in both total and female spawning stock removals relative to the actual 2015 policy of one fish, 28″ or longer. Implementing a one-fish harvest slot of 28″ to 36″ comes with minimal costs in terms of foregone angler welfare due to the relatively low rate at which trophy striped bass in excess of 36″ are encountered.

Modeling tools that can demonstrate possible consequences of strategies designed to operationalize ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) should be able to address tradeoffs over a wide suite of considerations representing the scope of marine management objectives. Coupled ecological-economic modeling, where models for ecological and economic subsystems are linked through their inputs and outputs, allows for quantification of such tradeoffs. Here, we link the harvest output from fishery management scenarios implemented in an end-to-end ecosystem model (Atlantis) to an input-output regional economic model for the Northeast US to calculate changes in socio-economic indicators, including the consequences of management action for regional sales, wages, and employment. We implement three simple scenarios (maintain, decrease, or increase current fishing effort), and compare model-projected values for systematic and sector-specific indicators. Systematic indicators revealed different ecological and economic outcomes, with large ecological responses and clear tradeoffs among the catch and biomass of species groups. Economic indicators for the region responded similarly to fishery yield, however changes in total sales did not match those in landed catch. Under increased fishing effort, a lower proportional increase in sales relative to total landed catch arose due to increased yield from lower value species groups. Average fisheries income changed little among scenarios, but was highest when effort was maintained at current levels, likely a reflection of fleet and catch stability. Our results serve to demonstrate that consequences of management may be felt disproportionately among species through the region and across different fisheries sectors. With our coupled modeling approach of passing Atlantis ecosystem model outputs to an input-output economic model, we were able to assess effects of fisheries management across a broader suite of indicators that have relevance for policymakers across multiple objectives.

We compared hypothetical willingness to accept (WTA) values for Massachusetts saltwater recreational fishing licenses with WTA values obtained in an actual (simulated) marketplace. Using a dichotomous choice contingent valuation approach, our results align with past evidence that found WTA values elicited from hypothetical transactions overstate those derived from an actual marketplace. We also provide the first evidence about the effectiveness of an ex-post certainty adjustment technique in a WTA environment. While the adjustment technique has been found to eliminate hypothetical bias in willingness to pay (WTP) settings, we find that when applied in a WTA setting, the approach mitigates but does not eliminate the overstated hypothetical WTA bias. We provide some theoretical conjecture as to the likely reasons why the certainty adjustment approach failed to remove the hypothetical WTA bias in our study and conclude with some practical policy implications.

Marine recreational fishing (MRF) is a high-participation activity with large economic value and social benefits globally, with separate catch allocations for commercial and recreational fisheries common in some countries. Although reporting of recreational catches has been a European legislative requirement since 2002, robust estimates of MRF are only available for some countries. In this study, the numbers of anglers, participation rates, days fished, expenditures and catches of two key species were synthesised to provide estimates of MRF in Europe. National data were collated by local experts and, where surveys did not exist, combined with extrapolations from donor countries corrected for population size or GDP. We estimated that there were 8.7 million European recreational sea fishers and a participation rate of 1.6%. Each year, 77.6 million days were fished and direct expenditure was €5.9 billion. Higher participation, numbers of fishers, days fished, effort, and expenditure was found in the Atlantic than in the Mediterranean region. Comparisons with other regions globally showed that MRF participation rates were higher in Oceania and the U.S., but expenditure was lower than the U.S. In contrast, participation rates, days fished and expenditure were higher in Europe than South America and Africa. Removals by MRF represented 27% of the total removals for European sea bass and western Baltic cod. These estimates highlight the importance of the European MRF and the need for collection of MRF data that can be used for stock assessment and fisheries management, leading to sustainable use of European marine fishery resources.

Recreational fisheries regulations frequently consist of possession limits, size limits, and seasonal closures that constrain the ability of recreational fishermen to catch or land fish. It is difficult to predict how these regulations will influence angler participation and recreational fishing mortality. This research integrates a utility-theory consistent model of demand for recreational fishing trips with an age-structured stock dynamics model to provide policy relevant advice to managers of the groundfish fishery in the Northeast United States. The recreational cod and haddock regulations implemented in 2014 have high costs in terms of foregone angler welfare and minimal positive impacts on stock conditions after three years. The ability of policies that generate large amounts of discarding, like high minimum size limits, to meet conservation objectives are also found to be quite sensitive to assumptions about the recreational discard mortality rate.

In the Northeast US fishery managers have attempted to control marine recreational fishing mortality through annual adjustments to the number and/or size of fish that can be kept. These measures, with a few exceptions, have generally failed to prevent recreational fishing mortality rates from exceeding annual target levels. In this study, we show that one of the reasons why keep limits may have failed is that a substantial number of anglers obtain little value from being able to keep self-caught fish. Our findings are based on a telephone survey administered to marine anglers in all of the coastal counties in the Northeast US in 2004/2005. To evaluate the importance of keeping self-caught fish, we provide estimates of the size of the marine angling population in the Northeast US that keeps fish for food or income and also for those that fish primarily for recreation and place little or no value on keeping fish. Demographic characteristics of the two groups of anglers are compared statistically and differences related to consumption of self-caught marine resources and to health warning advisories are discussed. We also estimate the size of the Northeast US angling population that relies on their self-caught marine resources as a cost-saving food source or as a supplement to household income. This information could improve the effectiveness of fisheries regulations and the ability of policy analysts to predict how anglers might be affected by proposed fishery management actions.

The American lobster (Homarus americanus) fishery is currently the most valuable fishery on the Atlantic coasts of both the USA and Canada based on ex-vessel value. Lobster conservation policies have traditionally focused on technical restrictions such as minimum size requirements, v-notching, and a prohibition on taking egg-bearing females to protect the resource, rather than direct controls on fishing effort or catch. However, in 2005 the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission adopted a plan for the southern New England lobster management area (Area 2) that establishes a structure for limiting the number of license holders and the number of traps each lobsterman can have in the water. In this article, a bio-economic modeling exercise is employed to examine the biological and economic impacts of reductions to the level of fishing effort in a fishery that is modeled to represent the full-time lobster fishing fleet in Area 2. Model results show that a reduction in fishing effort has the potential to: (i) improve the sustainability characteristics of the lobster resource and, in contrast to popular belief, (ii) actually stimulate economic growth in the coastal economy.

The industries linked to the uses of a large marine ecosystem (LME) have a substantial influence on contiguous coastal economies. We estimate the economic activity of U.S. marine sectors associated with the Northeast Shelf LME. Our best upper bound estimate of total output impact is $339 billion, including a total “value-added” impact of $209 billion. Total employment impacts are estimated on the order of 3.6 million persons. The estimate of total value-added impact is approximately 10% of the $2.2 trillion total gross state product for the region. In the future, critical interactions between industrial sectors and the ecological health of the Northeast Shelf will affect economic activity in opposing ways.