Citizen Science in the era of COVID SUNTAG
Stefan Sawynok
It’s fair to say the last couple of months have been hard work events wise, we have had all of our major events (bar one) cancelled or delayed in early June, all due to COVID. If that sounds like a bit of déjà vu, that might be because it is many of the same events were cancelled at the same time last year. Last year everyone
some opportunities. The start/stop nature of the last eighteen months has presented challenges in getting out on the water, that however has left time to think about how to get more out of what data we have. Over the year that has led to interesting insights and even development of more serious tools that make citizen science more useful to a range of stakeholders. That should be good news to many fishers who feel their data should be relevant to management decisions. That however is not a simple task and there is still a lot of work
that are important to fishers, the broader community and even managers. Without going into a deep dive on the why at this stage here are some of the kinds of problems that Citizen Science is good for as a guide for fishers. I am going to separate out Tagging, Competitions and Apps. TAGGING Tagging can be considered the Rolls Royce of fisheries-based Citizen Science. Tagging offers the most options and the data quality if there is a consistent process can be high. There was a lot of work done in the
Fig.1. Proportions of catches over 30 years. was in the same boat, this year it’s more like an act of God, with almost all the events cancelled at the last moment because of sudden lockdowns. We have had a challenging time as well, with staff in and out of lockdowns, even in quarantine and having to take extraordinary steps to keep our survey team moving along so we appreciate the kinds of stresses our clients are under. I seem to remember thinking this time last year that 2021 couldn’t roll on fast enough. For those caught up in COVID lockdowns all I can say is stay patient and when you get the chance go fishing. On that note this year’s Gone Fishing Day will be focused on mental health and if ever there was a time for it, it’s definitely now. I have seen some of the categories and in a normal year I would say that it’s a pretty exciting, in the current year I would describe it as an essential outlet. Whether you are in lockdown or not – there will be options for everyone to get involved and share their best fishing memories or create new ones. CITIZEN SCIENCE UNDER COVID While dealing with COVID has been a challenge for all, it’s also provided 104
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to be done. WHAT SORT OF PROBLEMS ARE CITIZEN SCIENCE GOOD FOR? Any fishing group thinking about Citizen Science should get advice particularly from the longerterm programs as many mistakes will be avoided. The reality is any good program will take time to deliver fruit and the first objective always should be to engage fishers and get a good stream of data flowing. One of the big challenges I find in working with Citizen Science is the feeling by fishers that all data is equal. That unfortunately is not true. On the other side of the fence, one of the big complaints of the traditional management space is that Citizen Science data run by voluntary programs lacks the sample consistency to be useful. That is correct in terms of how traditional sampling programs operate – there is currently no like for like replacement between volunteer data and traditional management data. That does not render volunteer data useless, it just means that volunteer data should be used for purposes other than management decisions at this stage. There are a lot of things outside of stock allocation questions
past on uses of tagging data, but that stagnated as other methods were favoured. In the past two years though tagging has made a resurgence as a lot more time has been invested in improving both the sampling methodology and the uses of data. Here are some of the key ways tagging data can be used. • Growth and Movement. Fishers always love hearing about ‘their fish’ and where it’s up to when it gets recaptured, and this has been the driving force of most participation. • Species Distribution
and Range Changes. With Climate Change gathering steam this is an increasingly important topic. Tagging is one of the excellent ways of tracking if there are habitat preference changes, changes in ranges or • Catch rates and size class proportions. This is one of those heading into the management space and can be very useful. That said there is a caveat – you need a consistent and decent number of trips per region (we aim for 300 fisher days), typically more than traditional boat ramp surveys. Note, this can be achieved through app-based reporting as well, but the advantage of tagging is fishers tend to be more disciplined in recording data. • Trends. This is an extension of catch rates, if there is a consistent amount of effort over time that meets that minimum threshold then the data can more reliably be used for trends. This won’t tell you the number of fish in the water but if good fishers are involved can be sensitive to the proportions of change. There can be a range of reason for change, but good data can highlight potential issues and help fisheries agencies to narrow down their monitoring. • Who is fishing in the Region? This is the inverse of growth and movement where instead of focusing on recaptures to tell us something about the fish, instead we use recaptures to tell us about the fisherman. With some simple demographic data such as where the fisher comes from, recaptures can be used to detect tourism and even changes in travel habits. • Long term fishing habits. If more data is collected such is fishing method you can detect changes in habits of the fishing population. In the past that has been best focused on the taggers as they are often very descriptive of lure types and other details. Increasingly though that is being flipped to recaptures
TABLE 1. SUMMARY OF RECAPTURES Year Total Recaptures 2018 2212 2019 1977 2020 1724 and I will cover this more in my next article. COMPETITIONS Competitions like tagging data have come into and out of favour in terms of their considered usefulness. My experience is the usefulness of the data comes down to competition design, there are some formats that are excellent for capturing data, others that are less so. More and more we find event organisers discussing design with us specifically to ensure their data is useful in a citizen science context. • Catch rate and size class snapshots – It’s possible to get a useful snapshot of catch rates in an event because you know exactly how much effort is involved but a lot depends on design. If the event is for limited species and all catches are reported then it can be used. Even if all catches such as undersized are not reported then legal fish can be used as a marker. Increasingly we are seeing event managers requiring all catches for this reason. • Participation. This is an area we are looking at increasingly from the perspective of the Male/ Female/Junior context as well as distance travelled for many events. • What’s important to fishers. One of the most interesting things to come out of last year’s gone fishing day was not the photos but the comments. This was more than an anecdotal treasure trove, modern data science has provided an array of tools for textual analysis using statistical methods and provided a lot of insights into what is important to fishers. • Fish Handling. Handling covers many things such as injuries, bleeding and scale loss and applies to photo
Fig.2. Decade by decade changes in fishing habits.
Total Unique Fishers 1242 1152 1127 events. Handling assessments are very useful in a social license context. We assessed 75 events in both 2019 and 2020 and we are on track to do a similar number in 2021. Of those 75 events all came up clean with minimal to no handling issues indicating that competition fishers maintain high standards of animal care. • Fish Health. This is one area we have done a lot of work in tightening methodology and going through various rounds of peer review. Photo based competitions are excellent for fish health in all formats. APPS Apps are seen by fishers (and in some spaces management) as the Holy Grail for recreational data and on this topic I can speak with a lot of authority given we have now produced just shy of 50 apps. I want to sound a word of caution on the use of apps for fishers and managers alike. Even before apps, there has been work done on comparing fisher diaries with creel/boat ramp surveys and they have never tallied, that is the answer on the total catch varies between the methods. Introducing technology does not solve the problem because it’s a sampling problem, not a technology problem. Any reporting method that is not ‘independently’ collected (that is selfreported) is going to have a reporting bias but that is only part of the problem, there is another equation that has to be balanced. Even if you manage to get the correct number of trips in a fishery, in all the same locations, anyone who has fished in a competition will know not all fishers are equal. Everyone has had that day where their mate seemed to be fishing a different pond to them. A lot of money will be spent on solving this problem. The solution in a sense is to scale up the data collection such that you maximise the chances of generating a subsample that reliably matches but here I think is the major problem. There is a talk of mandatory reporting via app, again mandatory reporting has been tried in other countries as a condition of license and generally still only had a lower reliable reporting rate. Apps are good for: • Catch rates, stock proportions and trends. • Species distribution and range changes.
