How competitive fishing events run on the mobile app MyCatch can address a wide range of fisheries science and management challenges.
On April 26th, Trout enthusiasts from across California flocked to Crowley Lake for opening weekend. This fishery often draws thousands of anglers on opening weekend, kicking off the fishing season in the Eastern Sierras. This year, opening day was also the kick off for the 2025 Crowley Lake Challenge — a citizen science event where anglers are helping develop new methods to estimate total harvest and discard rates of the recreational fishery.
Video showing an excellent release method.
This innovative project is being led by the mobile app MyCatch, and is in partnership with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Crowley Fish Foundation and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The goal is to evaluate if a voluntary reporting method (i.e. Crowley Lake Challenge) can accurately estimate the total harvest of fish in a lake.
Called an “Ecreel”, this method uses data collected through the app, combined with data collected from ongoing creel surveys to estimate total harvest. The method was originally developed by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife through their mandatory Salmon reporting system on the west coast of Oregon (Riggers and Jones, 2022). The primary difference with this project is that anglers report their catch data voluntarily by participating in the event.
This is one of six Ecreel projects that MyCatch is running across California and Oregon, evaluating this method across a wide range of fisheries. These events cover lakes and rivers, and include six different species: Trout (Crowley and Eagle), Kokanee (Whiskeytown), Perch (Crowley), Bass (Bonneville), Salmon (Salmon) and Steelhead (Deschutes). If you are interested in participating in any of these events as an angler, they are free to enter with lots of great prizes. The second event at Bonneville Pool kicks off June 1, 2025, with the remaining events starting later in the season.
The MyCatch Innovation
Citizen science has been popularized in a number of ecological fields and perhaps best illustrated through eBird, an application developed out of Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology. However the application of citizen science in fisheries has encountered several barriers which have restricted its broadscale application. Slowly but surely, these barriers are being chipped away as new, innovative approaches are being tested by start-ups in the app space. One of those start-ups, MyCatch by Angler’s Atlas, has been pioneering a novel approach to generating high quality fisheries data for research and management purposes. It combines a competitive framework, popular among tournament anglers, with an event structure that embeds the experimental designs within the rules and incentives (i.e. prizes). In simple terms, MyCatch runs fishing tournaments where the focus is on fisheries science, management and conservation — not just the biggest fish.
This new approach got its start when Covid shut down fishing tournaments across North America. At that time, anglers could still fish but not participate in public gatherings, such as weigh-in stations and award ceremonies. This presented an opportunity for the team at MyCatch to begin running catch-photo-release tournaments on their app. Since then, MyCatch has run hundreds of these fishing events across North America and applied this method to a wide range of fisheries science and management challenges.
For example, MyCatch is currently being used by State agencies across the Midwest to better monitor their Walleye fisheries. Called the Midwest Walleye Challenge, anglers across six US States (Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nebraska and South Dakota) are competing for a wide range of prizes and reporting their Walleye catches state-wide. High resolution data on the length distributions, catch rates, time of catch and waterbody are providing real time data on each State’s Walleye fishery.
Other examples of applying to this method to fisheries challenges include:
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- Monitoring Invasive Species Across the Hawaiian Islands: The 2024 Hawaii Invasive Species Roundup saw the major islands compete to see which island would be the best at fishing for invasive species. FYI — Kauai took the lead early and never looked back! To see an overview of the results, here is a slide deck given at the annual American Fisheries Society meeting in Honolulu in September 2024.
- Biosurveillance of a Virus in Black Bass Across North America: In partnership with the University of West Virginia and US Geological Survey, the Blotchy Bass Bonanza tracked the presence, prevalence and seasonality of a recently discovered virus on Black Bass.
- Predator Control in Kootenay Lake, British Columbia: The Kootenay Lake Angler Incentive Event is part of a larger management project to recover the Kokanee population in Kootenay Lake. The lake is world-renowned for the Gerrard Rainbow Trout which can grow to over 30 pounds. However the fishery experienced a collapse over a decade ago and researchers determined it was due to a collapse in the Kokanee fishery, which serves as the primary food source for the Gerrard Rainbows. As part of the management strategy anglers were recruited for short term predator control to help rebuild the Kokanee population.
- Coastal Fisheries Monitoring in South Carolina: The 2024 Port Royal Sound In-Shore Slam was held in partnership with the Port Royal Sound Foundation, a local environmental stewardship and education group with deep ties to the community. The event took place over 10-days and collected data on the state of the Port Royal Sound fishery. Over 1800 fish were reported, covering 41 different species. The event is planned again for 2025, with an extended duration event to capture data throughout the entire year.
- Monitoring for Whirling Disease in Alberta Streams: A telltale sign that a stream has been infected with Whirling Disease is that there are no young recruits, as the parasite quickly devours the cartilage of young trout. So when anglers don’t encounter small fish, it can be an indication that Whirling Disease parasites have infected the area. In 2023, MyCatch ran a test event called the Bow River Rainbow Trout Recruitment Survey across several Alberta streams to evaluate this method. Unlike regular events, this event rewards anglers who could catch the smallest fish. Although the sample size was relatively small, the results confirmed that the method could be used as an early indicator of infected areas. Publication coming soon.
Engaging Anglers and Protecting Their Privacy
Building a trusting relationship with anglers is the most important part of running successful citizen science projects. It is where most of the effort is spent and takes on many forms: initial outreach and recruitment; technical support; ensuring good quality control over the data; constantly communicating with anglers through multiple channels; and when possible, conducting in depth discovery calls with anglers one on one. This is critical to building and sustaining angler trust and support.
Another critical factor in building a trusting relationship is that strict rules are set on how an angler’s personal data can be used. The first rule of MyCatch is that “Secret Spots Stay Secret”. Any data passed to agency partners is anonymized and the location information is generalized to the waterbody or administrative level. This way the exact location of the angler is never revealed, while still retaining its usefulness for management and research purposes. Participating anglers are comfortable with that balance, with many of them enthusiastic that their data is helping their agencies manage the fishery.
Angler engagement is often seen as one of the biggest challenges fisheries agencies have when managing their recreational fisheries. This is where citizen science can lead the way in building new bridges between the anglers and the agencies. Pioneering new methods for providing anglers with “on ramps” that can contribute to the management of their fisheries serves to strengthen the bonds between anglers and their agencies. This is often an under-appreciated aspect of citizen science, but can yield significant long-term benefits for agencies struggling with angler trust and engagement issues.
Scaling Down Costs
Some consider the biggest advantage of using citizen science in fisheries is addressing the ever-growing challenge of costs. Conventional fisheries science is expensive, and given the scale of our fisheries, it presents a daunting challenge. As budgets continue to decline, finding cost effective strategies to conduct fisheries science and management is an imperative. It is here that citizen science can play a crucial role because it can leverage the voluntary support of engaged anglers to offset the high costs of conventional field survey crews.
Although these are still early days in this emerging field of fisheries, a number of early indicators show that costs can be reduced considerably. In some situations, MyCatch has seen costs reduced by two-thirds when compared with conventional methods. As the technology continues to evolve and economies of scale are factored in, it is reasonable to anticipate that project costs could be reduced by an order of magnitude or greater. There is still a long way to go before these savings are consistently realized but the opportunity and path forward is becoming clearer.
MyCatch has been at the forefront of this emerging field of fisheries science and its success across multiple types and scales of fisheries is an early indication that these new methods can bring big wins for fisheries science and management. Moving forward, the biggest hurdle to overcome will be creating effective “on ramps” within the agencies that can support these new methods.
Sean Simmons is Founder and President at Angler’s Atlas. He welcomes your questions or comments via email.
Projects in the Field is a series of independently produced articles profiling work supported by National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Electronic Monitoring & Reporting Grant Program, and is meant to raise awareness and support for these important initiatives.
