Relationships between angling effort and fish abundance in recreational marine fisheries

Relationships between angling effort and fish abundance have critical implications for the resilience and management of recreational fisheries, but these relationships have rarely been assessed empirically. Here, angling effort was related to fish abundance in three marine recreational fisheries in Florida, USA, through a suite of regression and time series methods that accounted for socio-economic and demographic variables. Overall, recreational angling effort was correlated with fish abundance, but further analyses provided little evidence of strong, causal relationships. Lack of strong relationships implies angling effort might increase in the future unrelated to fish abundance, a decoupling that could threaten the viability of fish populations in the absence of unpopular recreational effort limitation. The inability to establish more conclusive relationships between effort and fish abundance should motivate a future focus towards natural or manipulative experiments that may provide more powerful inferences.