Time-location sampling with capture-recapture to assess specialised recreational fisheries

Zischke, Mitchell T.; Griffiths, Shane P.

Time-location sampling with capture-recapture to assess specialised recreational fisheries

2014

Zischke, Mitchell T. | Griffiths, Shane P.

Specialisation in recreational fisheries has led to increasing diversification and segmentation of fishers into small ‘hard-to-reach’ populations that are inherently difficult and costly to sample using traditional methods. In this paper, we quantitatively assess, and expand upon, time-location sampling (TLS) for a specialised recreational sport fishery off eastern Australia using stratified random sampling of fishing tackle stores as aggregation points for fishers. Multiple TLS survey events facilitated the use of capture-recapture models to provide a minimum population size estimate of 3185 (SE 1338) fishers in the study region in 2010. Adopting a questionnaire with a long recall period (e.g. 12 months) may introduce biases in estimates of effort and catch from TLS. Therefore, these biases were corrected for using a ‘benchmark’ on-site survey, providing minimum estimates of effort and catch of 172,438 (SE 8440) angler hours and 4.7–31.4 (SE 2.6–6.8)t for six pelagic species, respectively, in the study region during 2010. TLS with capture-recapture is an efficient method for sampling hard-to-reach specialised fishers and may yield annual estimates of population size, effort and catch. Further research is needed to refine methods and develop systematic protocols that may be applied to a wide range of hard-to-reach populations, including recreational, artisanal and illegal fisheries.

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