Integrating Multiple Data Sets to Inform Climate Adaptation Strategies for Inland Fish and Recreational Fishing

Climate change is reshaping the abundance and distribution of sport fishes across the U.S., creating novel challenges for socially and economically important recreational fisheries. Existing fish and recreational fisheries data sets are invaluable given their broad geographic footprint and long-term data, but integration across datasets to inform management has been limited, leading to obstacles in collaborative research and management efforts. Agencies that manage recreational fisheries also conduct angler surveys to assess how anglers may affect fish populations, however they are rarely integrated with other datasets or with consideration of how climate change may affect the fish available to anglers.  

In this project, researchers will maintain and further develop the U.S Inland Creel and Angler Survey Catalog (CreelCat) and the Fish and Climate Change database (FiCli) to highlight applications of using both databases to inform management, particularly regarding climate adaptation. The databases will be used to determine how catch and harvest vary regionally, how angler activity may be linked to fish population growth rates, and how climate change may impact the social and ecological dynamics of recreational fisheries. By integrating the datasets with ongoing research of fish growth and consumption, this work will drive a suite of modeling efforts to predict fish and inland recreational anglers’ responses to global environmental change and inform relevant management strategies.