Themes of Contemporary Inland Fisheries Goals

Goals are important for the effective execution of public trust responsibilities by state inland fisheries bureaus, but formulating meaningful goals is not simple. Often bureaus look to their past and to their sister bureaus in neighboring states when crafting goals for their own freshwater resources. Herein, we review the goal themes of fisheries bureaus using publicly available documents and guided by previous literature. We test whether goals exhibit geographic patterns, presuming that differences and similarities in climate, natural resources, and people determine, to various degrees, the goal themes across the United States. We identified nine distinct goal themes, but found that they do not form clear geographic patterns, which contrasts with a similar analysis conducted in the 1970s. Since the 1970s, fisheries bureau goals have expanded and regionalism in goals has vanished. We suggest that changes in perspectives and communication technology, as well as provisions within nationwide funding mechanisms, have led to goals becoming more homogenous across the USA and more diverse within each bureau.