The future of recreational fisheries: Advances in science, monitoring, management, and practice

Abstract

Recreational fisheries (RF) are complex social-ecological systems that play an important role in aquatic environments while generating significant social and economic benefits around the world. The nature of RF is diverse and rapidly evolving, including the participants, their priorities and behaviors, and the related ecological impacts and social and economic benefits. RF can lead to negative ecological impacts, particularly through overexploitation of fish populations and spread of non-native species and genotypes through stocking. Hence, careful management and monitoring of RF is essential to sustain these ecologically and socioeconomically important resources. This special issue on recreational fisheries contains diverse research, syntheses, and perspectives that highlight the advances being made in RF research, monitoring, management, and practice, which we summarize here. Co-management actions are rising, often involving diverse interest groups including government and non-government organizations; applying collaborative management practices can help balance social and economic benefits with conservation targets. Technological and methodological advances are improving the ability to monitor biological, social, and economic dynamics of RF, which underpin the ability to maximize RF benefits through management actions. To ensure RF sustainability, much research focuses on the ecological aspects of RF, as well as the development of management and angling practices that reduce negative impacts on fish populations. For example, angler behavior can be influenced to conform to conservation-minded angling practices through regulations, but is often best accomplished through growing bottom-up social change movements. Anglers can also play an important role in fisheries monitoring and conservation, including providing data on fish abundance and assemblages (i.e., citizen science). The increasing impacts that growing human populations are having on the global environment are threatening many of the natural resources and ecosystem services they provide, including valuable RF. However, with careful development of research initiatives, monitoring and management, sustainable RF can generate positive outcomes for both society and natural ecosystems and help solve allocation conflicts with commercial fisheries and conservation. which ultimately determines the degree of environmental impacts across aquatic landscapes (

Assessing the viability of small aerial drones to quantify recreational fishers

“…A range of remote sensing techniques, such as satellite, manned aircraft and drones, are being used more frequently to improve management of recreational fishing (Brownscombe et al., 2019; Fernando et al., 2019). Although fishers were quantifiable using quadcopter drone‐based surveys, this platform did not provide substantial improvements compared with vessel‐based methods for sampling within the estuaries used in this study.…”

Resilience Management for Conservation of Inland Recreational Fisheries

“…We argue that the need for operationalized resilience is strong in many disciplines, but we turn our attention to one specifically-inland recreational fisheries in which humans catch fish for the primary purpose of leisure, though this may also overlap with other purposes, such as food or income (Brownscombe et al, 2019). Recreational fisheries are complex socioecological systems that are characterized by dynamic feedbacks between fish and angler populations (Arlinghaus et al, 2007(Arlinghaus et al, , 2013(Arlinghaus et al, , 2017Daedlow et al, 2011;Pope et al, 2014).…”

“…Recreational fisheries are complex socioecological systems that are characterized by dynamic feedbacks between fish and angler populations (Arlinghaus et al, 2007(Arlinghaus et al, , 2013(Arlinghaus et al, , 2017Daedlow et al, 2011;Pope et al, 2014). Resilience ought to be particularly pertinent to these fisheries, given the stresses inland systems face from climate change, water-use demands, urbanizing human populations, and invasive species (Lynch et al, 2017;Brownscombe et al, 2019). These socioecological disturbances have already been demonstrated to shift systems from one state to another (Arlinghaus et al, 2017).…”

Recreational sector is the dominant source of fishing mortality for oceanic fishes in the Southeast United States Atlantic Ocean

“…Historically, commercial fishing has been considered the dominant source of exploitation on marine fishes. Increasingly, however, recreational fishing is also recognised as an important source of mortality in many systems (Brownscombe et al., ; Cooke & Cowx, , ; Lewin, Arlinghaus & Mehner, ), including fisheries in Australia (McPhee, Leadbitter & Skilleter, ), Canada (Post et al., ), Europe (Hyder et al., ; Pawson, Glenn & Padda, ), and the United States (Coleman, Figueira, Ueland & Crowder, ; Ihde, Wilber, Loewensteiner, Secor & Miller, ; Schroeder & Love, ).…”