Recreational fishers self-reporting data catches the Government’s attention

The rationale for establishing Fish Mainland was expressed well in a 2019 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The article asserts that globally there is increasing recognition that, for too long, the considerable importance and effects of recreational fishing have been ignored. With this recognition comes a growing awareness that policymakers and fisheries managers should address their recreational fishing sectors by rethinking management objectives.

The article’s authors advise this rethink should put recreational fisheries on equal footing with commercial fisheries, particularly in inshore mixed fisheries. Their recommended objectives are to enable recreational fishers to be involved in decision-making processes, create incentives for sustainable fisher behaviour, and improve data collection and monitoring to better inform decision making. They also acknowledge the importance of organisations that represent recreational fishing interests and incentives for these organisations to be proactive, forward looking and cooperative.

In line with these recommendations, Fish Mainland has advised the Hon David Parker, Minister of Oceans and Fisheries, of the collective benefits in forming new ways of engaging on issues that affect fisheries important to recreational fishers.

For this to occur, management decision-making processes would need to be more inclusive and collaborative, allowing more public involvement in problem identification and formulation of workable solutions.

To date, the Minister’s response has largely echoed this Government’s tendency to tell us what to do. This top-down approach is reinforced through his officials’ continued reliance on consultation processes presenting pre-determined options that often lead to mediocre decisions.

For now, the Minister, as did his predecessor, is supportive of the above recommendation to improve data collection and monitoring of recreational fishing to better inform decision making.

For this purpose, Fish Mainland has taken steps to address the dearth of data on recreational fishing, starting with the Blue Cod fishery. These steps include addressing the major shortcomings of the National Blue Cod Strategy, such as the traffic light system that lacks any specifics on the data needed to legitimise colour changes in management areas as they improve or decline.

Fish Mainland successfully applied to MPI’s Sustainable Food and Fibre Futures programme for financial support to develop and implement a system for recreational fishers to self-report their data on targeted Blue Cod and bycatch. The data will support changes in the traffic light colours in South Island areas.

Fish Mainland is working with Plink Software in Nelson to develop the self-reporting system. The system will hold all associated data and allow it to be retrieved, updated, and reported.

Recreational fishers’ interface with the system will be a smartphone app compatible with both Apple and Android devices. The app will prompt fishers to report the species, size (legal or under), landed or released and by method and platform. While the data will record catch by latitude and longitude, it will be reported only at the area level.

There are South Island fishing clubs willing to assist in the system’s development and implementation, as are the Fiordland Marine Guardians. The direct benefit for them is the use of specific reporting codes so that they can regularly receive reports on their collated catch and effort data, while aggregated anonymised data for each area can be made available to the public, as well as to officials to improve management decision making.

Watch this space.

This article is also available on The Fishing Paper, October 2021 issue 193. View original paper