The effect of angler intercept surveying on recreational for-hire vessel reporting in the northeastern United States

ABSTRACT Objective The vessel logbook program in the northeastern United States provides records of angler participation on for-hire recreational fishing trips, which are used to produce official estimates of marine recreational catch. We evaluate whether the number of anglers reported per trip in logbooks varies systematically with the presence or absence of fishery-independent angler intercept (creel) surveying. Methods We employed matching methods to compare logbook-reported anglers-per-trip counts between headboat trips that were intercept surveyed and observationally similar headboat trips that were not intercept surveyed. To account for the nonrandom nature of intercept sampling, we made these comparisons between trips that were equally likely to be intercept surveyed based on the stratified random sampling framework used for assigning intercept samplers to specific headboat vessel trips. Results Analysis of 11 years of headboat logbook data revealed that angler intercept surveying led to between 1.61 and 1.65 additional anglers per trip being reported. This corresponds to a misreporting rate of between 3.24% and 3.92% and translates to an average of 19,523 to 23,580 unreported angler trips annually across all northeastern U.S. headboat operations. Conclusions Our analysis identifies a novel source of measurement error in a key recreational fisheries data stream and offers a framework to account for the error in both historical and ongoing data collection efforts.