Mainland Catch – phone app for South Island recreational fisher self-reporting
Fish Mainland’s policy for South Island marine recreational fishing lists five goals that form the basis for prioritising efforts in the coming years:
To support recreational fishing as a valuable and integral component of the South Island culture at the individual, family and community level.
To establish recreational fishers as respected partners in the stewardship of the South Island marine environment and fisheries resources.
To achieve recognition of New Zealanders’ right to access a reasonable share of fisheries resources.
To provide information on recreational fishing to improve management decision making.
To ensure the quality of sustainable recreational fishing opportunities into the future.
Regarding goal 4, adequate and appropriate information on recreational fishing is fundamental to effective management. However, in most fisheries there is very limited quantitative information on total recreational catch and catch relative to bag limits. This lack of information disadvantages the recreational fishing sector when decisions are made on fishing access and resource allocations.
Several South Island recreational fishers, fishing clubs and other groups, including the Guardians of Fiordland and Kaikoura, have highlighted the value they place on collecting more information and with greater frequency to gain a better understanding of localised trends in abundance, size distribution and availability of fish stocks that are important to recreational fishers.
During the last few years, one of Fish Mainland’s action related to this goal has been to explore with MPI officials the design of methodologies, including self-reporting, that can augment the infrequent use of existing methodologies used to collect data.
With the financial support of MPI’s Sustainable Futures Fund, Fish Mainland, in collaboration with Plink Software, has developed a system for recreational fishers to self-report their catch and effort, starting with the blue cod fishery.
The data is collected via a mobile app used by recreational fishers, appropriately named Mainland Catch. Specifically, Mainland Catch collects recreational catch and effort data on blue cod and bycatch to better manage the fishery through the traffic light system implemented under the National Blue Cod Strategy. Mainland Catch captures data that indicate trends in an area, which will help substantiate when a change is warranted in traffic light colours, such as an area moving from ‘red’ to ‘amber’ or ‘green.’
Mainland Catch is an intuitive and simple app for fishers to use on their fishing trips. A single person can record data for all members of the fishing group. It also provides a handy personal record for fishers of their trips. While data reporting will be aggregated to indicate what blue cod area fish were caught in, fishers’ personal data will not be made available to the public. Fishers will be able to access the GPS coordinates for all the fish they have personally caught.
Data generated by Mainland Catch will allow the calculation of monthly and annual effort for each blue cod area, the average catch rates, the average number of fish caught and retained per fisher, the average number of fish released per fisher and the proportion of zero catch trips and limit bag trips. Fishers are also able to record bycatch and marine mammal sightings.
Fish Mainland and Plink Software are excited about the opportunity to provide recreational fishers with a simple and enjoyable way of recording their fishing trips, while also providing valuable data to better manage this iconic fishery, which is so important to them.
Fish Mainland and Plink Software will soon release two videos on Mainland Catch that provide a simple ‘how to use’ explanation and an overview of the self-reporting system.
This article is available in The Fishing Paper and Hunting News’ April 2022 issue 199, view article.
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