Addressing Challenges Common to Modern Recreational Fisheries with a Buffet-Style Landscape Management Approach

Recreational fisheries management strives to provide satisfying fishing experiences to heterogeneous anglers while conserving fish stocks of varying productivity. Achieving this balance with one-size-fits-all regulatory strategies is challenging; but complex, waterbody-specific regulations may be onerous to anglers and managers. An alternative strategy is a limited but specifically diverse buffet of regulations across a landscape of discrete fisheries to improve outcomes over existing regulation strategies. This approach is tested using a landscape bioeconomic model with density dependent growth and survival feedbacks in fish populations and dynamic angler behavior. Sources of heterogeneity in angler behavior and biological processes are considered to select and apply an optimal suite of fishing regulations. At a regional level, the buffet-style strategy offers improvements over other management strategies by recognizing tradeoffs among the utility and effort patterns of diverse angler types. Furthermore, these benefits are generally maintained even when limited to only five regulations to ease implementation logistics. Additional requirements for management agencies using the buffet strategy are discussed, such as assessing angler heterogeneity and determining which regulations are implemented on which waters. Some of these challenges may be overcome because this approach is imminently compatible with active-adaptive and cooperative management ideas.