Uni of Portsmouth - FISP Part A Round 2 (360G-cabinetoffice-G2-GA-202209824034-22-23)

Sustainable management of wild capture fisheries, i.e. meeting the Sustainability objective of the Fisheries Act (2020) requires data on the biology, ecology and population structure of species. However, for many targeted in the UK appropriate data to make evidence-based management decisions are limited. This leads to outdated estimates of sustainable biomasses extracted, unreliable local and national quotas and, ultimately, an unsustainable catch. Many fisheries also target species that have an elevated conservation status (e.g. elasmobranchs) or the fisheries occur in areas designated as marine protected areas (MPAs). The lack of data is, therefore, also a highly significant gap in species and habitat conservation management, thus preventing a fishery from achieving the Ecosystem objective of the Fisheries Act (i.e. ecosystem-based management).Collecting ecological data requires significant investment of people, time and money. This is especially challenging in fisheries science as resources available for stock assessments are extremely limited. One increasingly popular approach for collecting data relatively cheaply is citizen science (Kullenberg and Kasperowski, 2016). The ability of citizen scientists (members of the public) to generate large quantities of ecological data over broad spatial and temporal scales has been demonstrated repeatedly (e.g. Vye et al., 2020). Recreational sea fishing is a globally popular activity, with Cisneros-Montemayor and Sumaila (2010) estimating that 0.9% of the worlds population are recreational sea anglers (RSAs), whilst Monkman et al. (2015) estimate there are over 880,000 in England. Thus, RSAs make a substantial group of highly motivated and engaged potential citizen scientists.