Recreational Catch Information Helps Assess the Health of Fisheries

NOAA-Recreational fishing is one of the great American pastimes—fostering connections to nature, family, and friends. It’s also a national economic driver, supporting 700,000 jobs and generating $138 billion in sales.

Experts at NOAA Fisheries’ regional science centers, in consultation with states and regional partners and through a public process, perform stock assessments. These assessments determine species’ abundance and health to inform subsequent fisheries management plans. They assure our shared fisheries resources remain productive, sustainable, and economically viable.

“Stock assessment analyses help safeguard both the fisheries stock and any communities that rely on access to those stocks,” said Dr. Matthew Nuttall, NOAA Fisheries’ Southeast Fisheries Science Center fish biologist. “Stock assessments form the foundation upon which regional management decisions are based, including the setting of annual catch limits and any other regulations, such as catch size limits and bag limits, designed to prevent overfishing.”

Stock assessors review a wide range of data to help determine stock status. This includes private boat, shore, and for-hire saltwater recreational fishing catch and effort information. These data are compiled through large-scale surveys that are part of the state-regional-federal recreational fishing data collection partnership known as the Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP). Using these data, we have been producing recreational fishing catch and effort estimates since the early 1980s. 

“MRIP’s value lies in its ability to generate long-term recreational fishing time series across a wide range of fish species,” said Dr. Katherine Papacostas, MRIP program manager. “These data help us understand changes in fisheries and fish stocks over time. The program not only delivers critical catch estimates directly through NOAA Fisheries, but also provides funding and statistical expertise to support our state partners, whose survey data are also essential to science-based fisheries management.”

Our scientists assess the recreational fishing catch and effort information collected through the MRIP partnership alongside commercial catch and biological fisheries data. This provides the scientific foundation for sustainable fisheries management and to fulfill mandates under the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

All of these datasets are plugged into a statistical stock assessment model that determines a stock’s current and future population size and if it is:

• Overfished (the population is too low)
• Undergoing overfishing (the catch rate is too high)

Stock Assessors Rely on Recreational Fishing Survey Data

Atlantic Coast

For many states along the Atlantic Coast, we are the sole provider of recreational catch and effort, or fishing trip, estimates. Scientists depend on these data to perform stock assessments, especially for fisheries with large recreational fishing components. This includes bluefish—an important recreational species along the Atlantic Coast.

Approximately 90 percent of the data used in the bluefish stock assessment come from MRIP.

“Without MRIP data, we wouldn’t be able to conduct this assessment,” said Brian Linton, research fishery biologist with the NOAA Fisheries’ Northeast Fisheries Science Center.

Similarly, total harvest from the recreational fishing sector is around 90 percent or above for striped bass, spotted seatrout, black drum, tautog, cobia, and red drum. These species are managed or co-managed by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. 

“Without the data we get from MRIP, we have no other way to measure total catch for species with large recreational fishing components,” said Dr. Katie Drew, Commission stock assessment team lead. “These data help us get a good grasp of the scale of the population for these species, as well as the impact fishing activity is having on the population. Length data captured from MRIP also helps us determine the age composition of the recreational catch and how it has changed over time, which can tell us a lot about the health of the population.”