A window on recreational fisheries
Recreational fishermen (Photo: Crispin Middelton, NIWA)
Many New Zealanders – more than 25% of the population – take part in some form of marine recreational fishing. The Ministry of Fisheries is gathering information on the nature and extent of recreational fisheries to help allocate fisheries resources among all users in a fair and sustainable manner.
Over the past four years, MFish has commissioned NIWA to survey several recreational fisheries around the country. This has involved a mosaic of projects using various survey methodologies to capture the disparate nature of the fisheries and provide harvest estimates where possible.
The early projects covered the most intensively fished areas of New Zealand, providing recreational harvest estimates of snapper, kahawai, and kingfish in the Hauraki Gulf, east Northland, and Bay of Plenty. These employed a combination of aerial counts of fishing vessels and interviews at boat ramps. We are now using webcam images of traffic at boat ramps to monitor how levels of fishing effort change from year to year in these areas.
Several smaller projects have characterised the nature and extent of recreational fisheries without providing harvest estimates, which are harder to obtain. Two recent examples are MFish-funded surveys of the west coast of the South Island, completed in December, and the Fiordland Marine Area, which got underway this summer. Both combine boat ramp, logbook, and overflight methodologies.
The Fiordland survey will provide a snapshot of the fishery as a baseline for future monitoring of the Fiordland Marine Management regime, an initiative of the Guardians of Fiordland Fisheries and Marine Environment Inc (Fiordland Guardians).