Temporal and spatial patterns of angler effort across lake districts and policy options to sustain recreational fisheries

Abstract

Studies suggest anglers allocate fishing effort across lakes districts based on fishing quality and travel time resulting in high effort near urban areas, which declines with distance. This results in quality fisheries in remote areas and poorer quality near population centres. In this paper we explore the effectiveness of harvest and effort regulations to counter this tendency for overfishing and stock collapse for a rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) fishery from a lake district in British Columbia, Canada. Our results suggest that daily bag limits can improve fishing quality if the effort is not too high, but fail to prevent collapse close to population centres. The ability of complete catch-and-release regulations to maintain quality fisheries is inversely related to the rate of release mortality. Catch-and-release fisheries with low mortality can maintain quality close to large cities, whereas higher release mortality does not prevent collapse. Direct fishing effort limitation can maintain quality fisheries, but a high proportional reduction in effort is required to maintain quality near population centres. Explicit consideration of the location of fisheries within lake districts is necessary to design effective management approaches and will likely require a mixed strategy with substantial spatial variation in harvest control.Résumé : Certaines études laissent croire que les pêcheurs sportifs répartissent leur effort de pêche dans les régions de lacs d'après la qualité de la pêche et la durée du trajet, ce qui fait qu'il y a un important effort de pêche près des zones urbaines et que cet effort diminue ensuite en fonction de la distance. Il s'ensuit donc que la pêche est de haute qualité dans les endroits éloignés et de moindre qualité près ces centres habités. Nous explorons, dans notre étude, l'efficacité des règlements de contrôle des captures et de l'effort de pêche pour contrecarrer la tendance à la surpêche et à l'effondrement dans une pê-che à la truite arc-en-ciel (Oncorhynchus mykiss) dans une région de lacs en Colombie-Britannique, Canada. Nos résultats laissent croire que des quotas de pêche journaliers peuvent améliorer la qualité de la pêche, si l'effort n'est pas trop grand, mais qu'ils n'arrivent pas à empêcher les effondrements près des centres urbains. La capacité des règlements obligeant la remise à l'eau complète des captures à maintenir la qualité de la pêche est inversement proportionnelle au taux de mortalité associé à la remise à l'eau. Des pêches avec remise à l'eau des prises et une faible mortalité peuvent maintenir la qualité près des grandes villes, mais elles n'empêchent pas l'effondrement de la pêche si la mortalité des poissons remis à l'eau est élevée. Une restriction directe de l'effort de pêche peut maintenir la qualité, mais il faut une réduction proportionnellement élevée pour maintenir la qualité près des centres urbains. Il est nécessaire de tenir compte de façon explicite de la localisation de la pêche dans la région de lacs afin de mettre sur pied des méthodes de ges...

Social‐ecological outcomes in recreational fisheries: the interaction of lakeshore development and stocking

“…A zero-inflated Poisson regression model that predicted the number of YOY per kilometer of shoreline as a function of lakeshore development and shoreline complexity had the greatest predictive power (ΔAIC of a model with lakeshore development alone = 13). 3a), which effectively decouples fishing pressure and adult walleye density (Post and Parkinson 2012). Specifically, an additional building per kilometer of shoreline increased the odds that a lake had no YOY present by 17% ± 13% (95% CI).…”

Resilient recreational fisheries or prone to collapse? A decade of research on the science and management of recreational fisheries

“…A common management tool used in open-access fisheries to control angling quality and prevent collapse involves controls on individual anglers such as size limits for harvest, bag limits and catch-and-release (Post & Parkinson 2012). There have been many empirical and modelling studies that test the efficacy of these techniques (for recent examples see Beard et al 2003b;Lewin et al 2006;Johnston et al 2010), but the general conclusion is that they can work in situations where the product of the total fishing effort and individual harvest behaviours do not exceed fish production.…”

“…There have been many empirical and modelling studies that test the efficacy of these techniques (for recent examples see Beard et al 2003b;Lewin et al 2006;Johnston et al 2010), but the general conclusion is that they can work in situations where the product of the total fishing effort and individual harvest behaviours do not exceed fish production. Also regulations that control the harvest of individual anglers, and not the total angler effort, can fail to protect not only angling quality, but also fail to prevent collapse, when the angling effort is high (Post et al 2002Post & Parkinson 2012). An inherent complexity in many recreational fisheries is that they are spatially structured within landscapes with many independent fish populations joined by mobile anglers (Beard et al 2003b;Parkinson et al 2004) further emphasising the importance of fully integrating angler behaviour into both dynamic models, and in the design of management approaches.…”

“…These analyses revealed that landscape patterns can range from self-regulating resilient fisheries, with low regional fishing effort, to sequential collapses across landscapes in inverse proportion to travel time from origin of anglers. Extending this approach to spatially distributed fisheries has several advantages over the ecologically oriented phenomenological approach taken by Post et al (2008) and Post and Parkinson et al (2012), in that it should be superior in making predictions outside the observation states, integrate multiple catch and non-catch utilities and their tradeoffs and incorporate angler heterogeneity (Fenichel et al 2012). Johnston et al (2010 demonstrated in a non-spatial context how diversity in the composition of angler community can alter the angling regulations that provide optimal utility, but these features of recreational fisheries have not yet been explored spatially.…”

“…The figure is adapted fromPost and Parkinson (2012). The road network from the Vancouver area (grey oval) into the lake district is indicated with dashed lines.…”