A scalable monitoring program in Canada built by anglers

Session: Great Lakes Citizen Science: Leveraging Our Love of the Lakes (1)

Sean Simmons, Angler's Atlas, [email protected]

Abstract

Canada has over a million fish-bearing lakes and streams, however only a small number of them are monitored due to the high cost of conventional survey methods. As a result, the vast majority of fish bearing waters remain unmonitored and potentially at conservation risk. 

Angler's Atlas is a digital platform in Canada that asked anglers to self-report their fishing trips, and in 2018 collected catch rate data on nearly 2,500 waterbodies across the country. In partnership with Alberta Conservation Association, the angler data is being tested against ongoing creel surveys and initial results show a clear match in both catch rate distributions and relative catch abundance. Furthermore, when scalability is analysed, the cost of creel surveys, sometimes more than $100,000 per waterbody, is orders of magnitude more than self-reported angler data, which on average costs about $200 per waterbody.