Explaining participation rates in recreational fishing across industrialised countries

Abstract

On average, 10.52% of the total population was found to fish for recreation across the industrialised world (N = 27 countries), amounting to an estimated 118 million (95% confidence interval 81-154 million) people in North America, Europe and Oceania. Participation rates declined with population density and gross domestic product, indicating a negative effect of urbanisation and post-modernisation on fishing interest. Participation rates also declined with increasing median age, average household size and unemployment rate, suggesting resource limitation to constrain participation in fishing. By contrast, two indicators of the cultural importance of fish (fish landings and per capita fish consumption) and an indicator of perceived need for leisure (weekly working hours) were positively correlated with fishing participation. Based on these findings, which explained 60% of the variance in fishing participation across the industrialised world, reduced fishing interest is to be expected with post-industrialisation. Dedicated management and marketing intervention is needed to reverse the track of diminishing fishing interest in industrialised countries. K E Y W O R D S :angler, demographics, socio-economic drivers, urbanisation, values, videophilia.

Determinants of Saltwater Anglers’ Satisfaction with Fisheries Management: Regional Perspectives in the United States

“…We also included certain demographic and experience variables in the model to segment the recreational fishing community. Certain demographic variables (i.e., income, gender, and age) were shown to influence recreational fishing participation (Arlinghaus et al 2014), and because participation influences satisfaction, we included age, education level, and income in this analysis. Gender and race were not included as the sample was largely homogenous; respondents were 84% male and 92% white.…”

“…On the basis of preliminary analyses of the survey results (Brinson and Wallmo 2013) and previous studies (Ditton et al 1978;Arlinghaus 2006;Arlinghaus et al 2014), we expected that anglers who were motivated by catching fish, were younger, less avid, and less experienced; and had lower levels of education and income would be more satisfied than other groups with the fisheries management process and management outcomes. However, certain variables performed better than others across both the regional management process and management outcomes satisfaction models (Tables 5 and 6).…”

Urban Recreational Fisheries in the Australian Coastal Zone: The Sustainability Challenge

“…On average across the industrialized world, about 10.5% of the population are recreational fishers [26]. Participation numbers and participation rates in each of the major Australian coastal capital cities are shown in Table 1.…”

When push comes to shove in recreational fishing compliance, think ‘nudge’

“…The global estimation of recreational fishing 1 participation is around 11% of people [13] with an estimated number of fishers ranging between 220 million [47] and 700 million [36]. Recreational fishing provides participants with a number of social, economic and health benefits [37,72] as well as a potential source of protein [35,38].…”