CONSERVATION

You own the best tool for accurate fish counts,

This is not the first time I have discussed this, so bear with me if it sounds repetitious. There are approximately 9 million saltwater anglers in the US. Guessing conservatively, 80 percent of those anglers have smartphones, which means there are 7.2 million mobile platforms that could supply fishing-success information into a system managing the fish we all like to catch. If just 10 percent volunteered to submit data every time they went fishing, the amount of information would dwarf what is currently compiled with in-person intercepts and fishing-effort surveys. The amount of data would be valuable to managers, if it could be ground-truthed and calibrated against in-person collected data.

So, what are the problems with this kind of data collection? The first is outreach and how to gain enough volunteers so that a broad sample of anglers get involved. The larger the sample, the less likely there is bias in terms of angling technique and experience. The next issue is getting volunteers to remain active in the program over a reasonable period. Current experience indicates that anglers sign up, but then over a short period, they submit information less and less until they are simply inactive.

In a number of experiments so far, volunteer retention has been one of the main problems. If we look back 25 or 30 years, there were a variety of fish-tagging programs that got a large number of anglers involved with the collection of data, which could ultimately be used in managing fish. That data collection took a lot more effort than the current requirements of taking a couple of measurements and entering the information into iangler, isnapper, the SAFMC Release app or any of the other apps used by anglers. One of the frustrations of some taggers was not understanding how that data would be used to manage the resource. That is the same today as the data collection and

“There are 7.2 million platforms that could supply information into a system managing the fish we all like to catch.”

system have become complex.

Assuming all politics are local—folks are most interested in the fishing in their backyard—the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council has been developing a Fishery Citizen Science Program since 2019. The vision of this program is to advance science and increase trust one project at a time, a strategy to narrow the focus of effort to improve local fisheries management information through collaborative science. While this program started in 2019, we know what happened in 2020 to impede data collection. So, this program is still relatively new. The SAFMC set out a list of priorities that covered a broad variety of specific needs, starting with otolith collection to calculate fish age, gonad collection to determine maturity, discard information, genetic sampling with fin clips, and personal fishing logbooks, which help with abundance estimates. Some are hands-on, and some entail electronic data collection, but they all relate to local species.

The first citizen science project was SAFMC Scamp Release. This gathers data on the number of scamp grouper that are released, their size, the locations of the catches, the depths being fished, and what sort of descending devices or venting tools were used. The SAFMC developed its own SAFMC Release app for anglers to record and submit the data. In the development process, the SAFMC worked with the Atlantic Coast Cooperative Statistics Program and, through a grant, it expanded the app to cover a variety of shallow-water grouper species.

A secondary program, called Fishstory, looks at hundreds of historic photos from the 1940s to ’70s taken on a headboat fleet in Daytona Beach, Florida, to document catch and length estimates. This effort uses crowdsourcing to get a lot of folks looking at these old photos.

In both cases, the SAFMC staffers developed training materials, guiding principles and standard operating procedures for all volunteers who get involved.

This has not been a simple buildit-and-they-will-come project. The SAFMC understood some of the problems with getting anglers involved and then keeping them active in the program. That is why this program took several years to develop. Staff were assigned to craft angler outreach and to set up action teams. This will allow the staff to assess what has been successful, what needs to be improved, and what could be eliminated.

It has always been my feeling that anglers, as a user group, have a lot of useful information for managers. How to get that information in a format that is usable for resource management has always been the issue. It now looks like more-universal citizen science is getting closer.