Recreational fisheries provide important social, economic and cultural benefits but are difficult to monitor due to the dispersed nature of fishing activity across large spatial and temporal scales. In NSW, existing monitoring programs, including on- and off-site survey approaches, provide important information for fisheries management. Social media can potentially be a complementary monitoring tool, as recreational fishers share catch related information online. This study therefore sought to evaluate the potential for social media to provide informative recreational catch data to supplement existing monitoring approaches in NSW, Australia.
A pilot study compared various social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram and YouTube) to determine which platform provided the most suitable data. Facebook produced the greatest number of usable posts, greater species composition and more consistent catch data, and was therefore selected for the final analysis. Facebook posts were then analysed to assess catch composition and seasonal and interannual variability. These results were then compared with data collected by the off-site, telephone-diary survey, routinely carried out in NSW. Additionally, an online survey was conducted to examine recreational fishers’ fishing activity, social media use and posting behaviour.
There were broad similarities with information generated by the telephone-diary survey as well as seasonal and year-to-year variation in online fishing posts, suggesting that social media may capture useful temporal patterns in fishing activity. The online survey found that while many fishers post about fishing there were some key demographic biases. Social media can therefore potentially provide low-cost, high-frequency complementary data for recreational fisheries monitoring but is heavily influenced by selective posting and bias.