Recreational fisheries sampling

Anglers can remove significant quantities of individual fish stocks. Monitoring these catches requires completely new methods, e.g. telephone and on-site surveys.

The main difficulty in collecting data from the recreational fisheries sector is that the number of anglers in Germany ("population") is very large. We therefore have telephone surveys conducted at larger intervals in randomly selected households to determine the activities (the "fishing effort") of German anglers in the Baltic Sea. To also determine how many and which fish species anglers catch, scientific observers from the Institute of Baltic Sea Fisheries sample all beaches and harbors on the Baltic Sea coast of Germany and interview anglers about their catches. Of course, they have to be on site at times when the anglers are active, i.e. mainly on weekends and in the evening and night hours. In addition to anglers, there are recreational fishers who are allowed to fish with commercial gear. Their numbers are comparatively small, and there is a special sampling strategy for this group as well.

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