Meeting the Evolving Data Needs for Assessment and Management of Offshore Recreational Fisheries: Case Studies in Florida

Since reauthorization of the Fishery Conservation Act, U.S. fisheries management has experienced a fundamental shift towards annual catch limits (ACLs). The southeastern U.S. supports the highest concentration of recreational fishing effort, and monitoring programs across this region were ill prepared to provide data needed to manage such large, dispersed fisheries with ACLs. The primary source of catch statistics in Florida is the Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP). The MRIP is a regional-scale general survey of all saltwater recreational fishing and is a blunt tool for managing fisheries within the framework of ACLs. This talk will highlight collaborations between the State of Florida and the National Marine Fisheries Service to address the evolving data needs for offshore recreational fisheries. We will introduce three case studies. The first was designed to measure the size distribution and mortality fraction of recreational discards directly within the fishery, and has helped fill important data gaps in regional stock assessments. The second was designed to monitor ACLs for South Atlantic red snapper over short recreational harvest seasons (3 to 8 days). We will also discuss collaborative efforts to improve sample sizes in the MRIP from offshore landing sites and implement a specialized survey to improve spatial and temporal resolution in recreational effort estimates for a suite of reef fish species in the Gulf of Mexico.