From Bora, via Greg Laden, comes news that Twitter, or, more accurately, short burst cell phone communication, may be the next innovative tool in the fisheries manager’s toolbox. It seems that the North Carolina Sea Grant program is looking at ways to allow recreational charter boat captains to text in catch data from their cell phones.
As a fisheries oceanographer, I think this is huge for several reasons. First, recreational catch has been, and continues to be a huge hole in our data sets of fish populations. While commercial fishermen are almost drowned in reporting requirements, the Nation’s recreational anglers, from the guy standing on the dock to the family on a North Carolina head boat, have no such requirements. So there is a whole fishery related mortality component we can’t account for. That means that when federal and state fisheries managers calculate how much harvest a given fish population can sustain, they are probably over estimating harvest because they have an underreporting of catch.
Second, by making the charter boat captains part of the reporting chain, it reinforces their ownership of the resource. I suspect that, once this kind of data is regularly used for setting catch limits, charter boats will become even more responsible in terms of ecological operations then they are now. That would be a good thing.
And finally, this development may well mean Twitter is actually good for more then annoying me. Too bad I didn’t think of this first . . . . .
Posts
3 comments:
This is an interesting concept. here in KY when i was a kid you physically took wild game to a checking station where it was weighed and reported. Now we have 'tele-check' which we call 'tele-joke' because there is a lot of lousy reporting.
What were the reporting options before this?
Prior to this, recreational catch was either documented dockside by stae or federal survey workers, or through telephone interviews with captains. Neither got very many folks, so the data sets have always been somewhat suspect.
As noted in the N.C. Seagrant article, commercial captains have to keep two logs (one state, one federal) which have to be available at all times for inspection, and they have to file periodic reports as part o ftheir licensure. They have been a bit balky of late, as they view recreational catch as their competitor for an increasingly scarce resource. So from a managemnt standpoint, I hope this catches on (Pun intended)!
Having accurate numbers definitiely helps in planning limits, etc. We just increased our elk quota from 400 to 1000 for next year based on the data they are getting. Those hunts are much more closely monitored though.
Fishing has always been a little tougher to keep track of for a lot of reasons.
Post a Comment