Evaluation of bus-route and aerial-access methods for Great Lakes recreational fisheries surveys

Management agencies in the Great Lakes region invest heavily in recreational fisheries surveys to achieve sustainable fisheries management. Costly aerial surveys are often utilized to survey expansive and complex recreational fisheries in the Great Lakes. Using concurrent field surveys and Monte Carlo simulations, bus-route and aerial-access creel survey methods were evaluated and compared for the recreational fisheries of the Michigan waters of Lake Erie. The two methods yielded comparable estimates for the 2021 surveys. The bus-route method was more cost-effective than the aerial-access method. The simulations show that the bus-route method produced unbiased estimates and was statistically more efficient than the aerial-access method. The simulations indicate that the aerial count method was subject to an often overlooked undercoverage bias due to its inability to cover nighttime fishing. Simulations allowed for the identification of estimators with relatively small bias under certain conditions for the aerial count method. Overall, the bus-route method was found to be statistically sound and cost-effective for surveying the Lake Erie recreational fisheries.