NMFS WORK TO IMPROVE FISHING EFFORT SURVEY CONTINUES

 

The National Marine Fisheries Service recently issued an update to stakeholders, announcing that work to improve the Fishing Effort Survey, a key component of the Marine Recreational Information Program that is used to estimate recreational effort, catch, and landings, is moving forward, and pointing the way toward more accurate recreational fishing data.

As readers may recall, about one year ago, NMFS announced that it had found a problem with the Fishing Effort Survey, which was leading some anglers to overstate the number of trips that they took in the most recent two-month “wave,” and so resulting in catch and effort being overstated, by perhaps as much as 30 or 40 percent.

Initial investigations suggested that the problem might be as simple as how the questions in the Fishing Effort Survey are ordered.

It is a tenet of survey design that any such questionnaire begin with simple-to-answer questions, and then  move on to those that might take a little more thought.  Thus, the original version of the Fishing Effort Survey began by asking anglers how many fishing trips they had taken in the previous two-month wave.  Following that question was another that asked how many trips the responding angler had taken in the previous year.

When a NMFS quality control team reviewed angler responses, they were surprised to find that a significant number of anglers said that they had taken more fishing trips in the past two months than they had in the past twelve, an illogical and obviously impossible result.  However, such responses were common enough to significantly skew the Fishing Effort Survey’s results.  Although the reasons behind them can’t be determined with absolute certainty, it appears that many anglers were reluctant to report making zero trips in the previous wave, and so reported phantom outings that never, in fact, occurred.

NMFS next needed to find out just how badly the inaccurate survey responses skewed the Fishing Effort Survey data. 

While pilot studies suggested that the error was somewhere in the 30 to 40 percent range, the inaccuracies differed from mode to mode (e.g., the magnitude of the error for shore-based anglers was different than the error generated by private-boat fishermen), region to region, and fishery to fishery.  But when NMFS flipped the questions in the survey, and asked anglers how many trips they took in the past year before asking about the previous two-month wave, the estimated number of trips dropped between 30 and 40 percent.

In 2024, NMFS is conducting a much larger-scale study to determine just how to address the previous inaccuracies.  Such study is needed because, as explained by Dr. Evan Howell, director of NMFS’ Office of Science and Technology,

“The findings from [the] limited pilot study should not be taken as the final answer, and the results cannot be generally applied to all fisheries and fishing areas.  We have to do our due diligence in conducting a full-scale study prior to assessing the need for design changes or making large-scale changes to assessments or management measures.”

Throughout 2024, NMFS surveyors will use both the old and the revised survey form, so that they can compare, and hopefully eventually calibrate, the results.  And the new survey form won’t only change the order of the questions.  It will also introduce additional, planned improvements, such as surveying on a monthly basis, rather in two-month waves. 

According to Dr. Howell,

“The switch to monthly sampling will have positive impacts to recreational fishing science and management, and is a very important piece of this study.  Monthly survey administration will produce more frequent effort and catch estimates, which is a priority of our regional partners.  A shorter respondent recall period may also minimize reporting error in the survey.”

NMFS is committed to getting the revised survey format right and, unfortunately, getting things right will take time.  (I’m reminded of the old saying that you can have a job done quickly, done cheap, or done right—pick two out of three; given Congress’ chronically parsimonious funding of NMFS’ science programs, choosing between “quickly” and “right” are the only two realistic options that the agency has.)

Because of the need to move slowly and precisely, we won’t see the results of the new survey format—assuming that it ultimately passes scientific peer review and is adopted by the agency—incorporated into stock assessments and management measures until 2026.  That’s because final 2024 estimates won’t even become available to NMFS until sometime in April 2025, and once they are available, agency scientists will have to prepare their final report on the outcome of the study, and determine how to calibrate historical data with the new Fishing Effort Survey methodology.

Until then, data collected using the current survey methodology will be used in all stock assessments and to compute fishery management measures.

Upon hearing of the overestimation issue, many in the recreational fishing community jumped to the erroneous conclusion that such high estimates resulted in unnecessarily restrictive angling regulations, but such views merely revealed how little such folks knew about the stock assessment process and the science underlying fisheries management.

In fact, recreational landings are an important data input in the stock assessment process, with the assumption generally being that high recreational landings suggest a stock large enough to support such landings over the course of years.  Thus, an overestimate of recreational landings will typically result in an overestimation of the size of a fish stock, leading to commercial quotas and recreational harvest limits that may be higher than the stock can sustain in the long term. 

Instead of resulting in recreational management measures that are unduly strict, an overestimation of recreational landings may well result in regulations that are not nearly strict enough.  That could well be the case with a number of recently assessed, recreationally important fish stocks, including striped bass, summer flounder, black sea bass, and bluefish.

But it will be a couple more years before we know whether that is the case.

In the meantime, the good news is that, as NMFS notes,

“If the agency shifts to a revised design—based on the findings of the follow-up study—the magnitude of historical estimates may change, but critical catch and effort trend information are expected to remain similar.  It’s important to note that stock status determinations are relatively consistent when trend information hasn’t changed.”

To put that in a real-world context, the spike in recreational striped bass landings in 2022 was real, and not merely an artifact of the Fishing Effort Survey overestimating angling activity, and anyone expecting to be able to land more red snapper due to the current glitch in that survey is likely to be very disappointed.

The bottom line is that good fishery management, and good fisheries science, is impossible without good data, and given that recreational fishing has the potential to do real harm to many fish stocks, that means good recreational fishing data as well.

NMFS is making ongoing efforts to assure the quality of Marine Recreational Information Program data, and discovered the issues with the Fishing Effort Survey as a result of such quality control initiatives (ongoing initiatives, it should be noted, that are conspicuously absent from most, if not all, state recreational data programs).  It will be at least two more years before the results of NMFS’ overhaul of the Fishing Effort Survey become available for use in stock assessments and fisheries regulation.

Until such results are available, knowing that overstated estimates of recreational effort, catch, and landings can inflate the estimates of stock size, and make fish stocks more vulnerable to overharvest, we can only hope that regional fisheries management councils’ scientific and statistical committees make note of recreational data uncertainties when setting the acceptable biological catch, and the such councils, and other management bodies, use a bit more precaution when setting annual catch limits over the next few years.