Improving the Validity, Reliability and Affordability of Recreational Fishery Surveys: an Example from the Lake Roosevelt Recreational Fishery

Lake Roosevelt is 243 km long, making it the largest reservoir in Washington and the sixth-largest reservoir in the USA. Monitoring and evaluation of the Lake Roosevelt recreational fishery is accomplished through the Lake Roosevelt Fisheries Evaluation Program funded by the Bonneville Power Administration. The Spokane Tribe, the Colville Confederated Tribes, and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife co-manage the fishery. Eastern Washington University provides scientific advice and completes various research tasks as a subcontractor. A review of the sampling protocol was completed in 2004 and a new sampling protocol was initiated in 2005. An automatic R program was developed to output more than 28,800 estimates of catch per unit effort, catch by species, location, sessions and time blocks within ten seconds and the bootstrapping sub-routine can output the coefficients of variation of all estimates within a day. The new sampling protocol significantly improves the validity of the estimated total number of fish caught by incorporating shore angler catch and effort. The bootstrapping method produces non-negative 95% confidence intervals for the total catch of rare fish species. The program can shorten the completion of the final annual reports from an average of 4 years to 6 months and reduce by more than half  survey transportation cost. Discussion on future need is included.