Estimating Recreational Fishing Effort from Onsite Survey Data

The Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP) Access Point Angler Intercept Survey (APAIS) is an onsite survey designed primarily for estimating catch rate.  The method for estimating fishing effort depends on data collected by offsite telephone or mail survey. With catch rate estimated from onsite survey and effort from offsite survey, catch is estimated as the product of catch rate and effort.  In addition to conducting interviews with eligible anglers, APAIS also counts all anglers and fishing boats that exit the site during the sampling period at each site visited.  The counts of anglers and fishing boats obtained from APAIS provide a means of estimating effort.  In this study, we investigated the use of APAIS data to estimate fishing effort and compared the effort estimate with that obtained from the telephone survey. Compared with the effort estimate from the telephone survey, the effort estimate based on APAIS data was lower for shore, private boat, and charter boat fishing modes and higher for head boat fishing mode. We discussed the factors that could have caused lower effort estimates from APAIS and recommended future studies to investigate these factors.