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Abstract Recreational fisheries are culturally and economically important around the world. Recent research emphasizes that understanding and managing these systems requires a social–ecological perspective. We systematically reviewed quantitative social–ecological models of marine and freshwater recreational fisheries to summarize their conceptualization of social, ecological, and social–ecological dynamics and identify research frontiers. From a candidate set of 626 studies published between 1975 and 2018, 49 met criteria for inclusion in our review. These studies, though diverse in terms of focal species and processes considered, were geographically limited to a few locations and ignored large regions of the globe where recreational fishing is important. There were also important gaps in the social and ecological processes that were included in published models. Reflecting on these patterns in the context of previous conceptual frameworks, we define five key frontiers for future work: 1) exploring the implications of social and behavioural processes like heuristics, social norms, and information sharing for angler decisions and fishery dynamics; 2) modelling governance with more realistic complexity; 3) incorporating ideas from resilience thinking and complex adaptive systems, including slow variables, destabilizing feedbacks, surprises and diversity; 4) considering key ideas in fisheries systems, including spatial and temporal effort dynamics, catch hyperstability, and stocking; and 5) thinking synthetically about the models that we use to describe social–ecological dynamics in recreational fisheries, via explicit comparisons and formal integration with data. Exploration of these frontiers, while remembering the distinction between model complexity and model usefulness, will improve our ability to understand and sustain recreational fisheries.
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Angler preferences and satisfaction in a high-threshold “bucket list” recreational fishery
It is important to understand recreational anglers’ motivations for fishing in order to predict when, where, and how they interact with species that can be sensitive to overfishing. So far, few studies have investigated angler motivation in recreational fisheries that are extremely distant from their angler population, require specialized angler skill, and pose other barriers to participation like high travel and equipment costs. We collectively refer to these as “high-threshold” fisheries and explore angler motivation and its implications for anglers’ decision-making in one particularly remote example, the Mongolian fly fishery for endangered taimen, Hucho taimen, the largest salmonid in the world. We used a mixed-methods approach that enriched discrete choice experiments with in-depth qualitative interview data to investigate anglers’ motivations for participating in the taimen fishery, their satisfaction with the fishing experience, and their stated interest in participating in the fishery in the future. We found that anglers preferred fewer high-quality, trophy-sized fish to a higher catch rate of smaller taimen, but that activity-general factors like the opportunity to travel to an “exotic” wilderness destination were also highly motivating. The anglers we sampled were all first-time taimen fishermen and many were bucket-list anglers who sought a wide variety of fishing tourism experiences throughout their lifetime and therefore and had no intention to return to the taimen fishery. Instead, these fishermen selected their future trips from among a set of similarly remote, specialized, and costly fisheries throughout the world, especially in developing countries. We argue that these high-threshold fisheries should not be studied in isolation but instead would benefit from a unified research approach that accounts for their unique traits and shared angler population.
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- PAR ID:
- 10118174
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Fisheries research
- Volume:
- 220
- ISSN:
- 0165-7836
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 105364
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fishres.2019.105364
