Optimizing Stocking Programs at the Landscape Scale: What Do You Optimize and How Do You Do It?

Many fish stocks that are in close proximity to population centers are heavily fished. In order to accommodate angler demands, supplementing natural fish stocks with hatchery fish has become an important part in maintaining recreational fisheries. Management of stocked fisheries is often concerned with creating trade-offs in fish size and abundance to meet angler demands.  However, there is a lack of knowledge on how to optimize the fishery resource at a landscape scale given variation in angler demands and ecological processes that delimit the availability of resources. To address this issue, we manipulated stocking rates, monitored angler effort and conducted angler and fish surveys in 30 lakes in the interior of British Columbia, Canada. We suggest that the optimization of management strategies at a landscape scale needs to consider the interaction of angler demands and the productive capacity of the resource.