Estimating Recreational Fishing Effort Using Autonomous Cameras at Boat Ramps versus Creel Surveys

Measuring fishing effort is a common practice in fisheries management. Traditional access‐point or roving creel surveys rely on in‐person interaction between management agency personnel and anglers, the cost of which can restrict where and when the surveys can be performed. Increasing the efficiency of the techniques that are used to estimate recreational fishing effort would benefit management agencies by reducing costs or allowing for sampling at more waterbodies. We investigated using motion‐triggered game cameras installed at boat ramps to capture the number of fishing trips, number of anglers, and trip durations to be used in estimating fishing effort. We tested boat ramp cameras at five lakes in the Florida Panhandle and peninsular Florida having diversity in their fisheries and user‐group characteristics and ranging from small (12,000 ha). On three of the lakes, we concurrently conducted roving creel surveys, allowing us to compare the methods’ estimates of fishing effort, costs, and personnel time. The camera‐based estimates of fishing effort were similar to those from the roving creel survey but tended to exceed them, including up to a factor of 2.22 in one case. These differences in effort estimates may have been due to several things such as erroneously designating some nonfishing trips as fishing trips during photo analysis, overestimating time spent fishing by ascribing all of the time between launch and retrieval to fishing, or underestimating fishing effort via roving creel surveys, as creel clerks might have occasionally missed anglers during the angler counts. Roving creel surveys were 1.25–2.50 times as expensive as camera counts because the cameras required less personnel effort. The detection probabilities that were calculated from the camera results ranged from 0.57 to 1.00, but the value was ≥ 0.86 at four of the five lakes. Despite some challenges, boat ramp cameras provided an effective, cost‐beneficial tool for estimating fishing effort.