Recreational fisher self-reporting hits the water

Fish Mainland is founded on an extensive network of individual and club-affiliated South Island recreational fishers, and so it can draw on decades of fisher experience. This network includes many who are also commercial or Maori customary fishers, which provides opportunities to collect and disseminate information and influence on issues that impact shared fisheries.

Several in the network have highlighted the value they place on collecting information to gain a better understanding of localised trends in abundance, size distribution and availability of fish stocks that are important to recreational fishers.

In 2019-20, Fish Mainland and Oceans and Fisheries (MPI) designed a recreational fisher self-reporting system, which they agreed would be the next best step in managing the iconic blue cod fishery via the National Blue Cod Strategy.

While the Strategy introduced a traffic light system (e.g., colours change as available data suggest the state of the fishery is improving or declining, which reflect differences in daily bag limits), it did not specify the data needed to legitimise colour changes across management areas.

The validity of any colour changes will be critical to gaining recreational fisher buy-in for the traffic light system. An effective way to gain buy-in is through citizen science (e.g., self-reporting).

Fish Mainland secured the services of the Nelson-based Plink Software Ltd to develop the self-reporting system. Plink has expertise in mobile application (app) development, including in Te Reo Maori.

The self-reporting system design comprises an app to be used by recreational fishers to report their catch and effort and keep their data secure. The system is designed to deliver samples of recreational fisher reported data that provide broad signals, or indicator statistics, regarding trends in catch and effort for both targeted blue cod and bycatch within each area.   

In addition, the self-reporting system can help resolve two unintended consequences of the Strategy’s implementation, which are that fishers cannot fillet at sea nor travel through an area with a larger daily limit taken in another area.

Impending MPI consultation will seek feedback on a regulatory amendment that would allow fishers to transit from one area to another with fish on board, provided fishers can prove where the catch was taken. The app would be the easiest means of proving where the catch was taken.

The self-reporting system is like the longstanding voluntary arrangements for collecting catch-per-unit-effort data for the commercial rock lobster fisheries. Over time, these voluntary arrangements have continued to improve so the data have become integral to stock assessments for sustainability purposes.

The self-reporting system will provide a similar process of continually improved voluntary arrangements. The improved data will form the basis for inter-sectoral discussions about management processes that will help form collective recommendations to the Minister of Oceans and Fisheries in ensuring the fishery’s sustainability and reducing environmental impacts of fishing.

Currently, Fish Mainland’s Directors are eliciting the participation of individual fishers, club-affiliated fishers, and others, including the Fiordland Marine Guardians, who understand the potential value of their reporting and are prepared to report regularly and accurately.

The benefit for them is to have specific reporting codes so that participating fishing clubs and others can regularly receive reports on their members’ collated catch and effort data for each area and aggregated anonymised data, which will also be available to the public.

As the self-reporting system proves its value for the blue cod fishery, it can be applied to other shared fisheries. At that stage, the app will be available to more South Island recreational fishers to record their data to help improve management of the fisheries.

This article is also available on The Fishing Paper and Hunting News’ January 2022 issue 196. View Original Article