Abstract

Sport fisheries or recreational fisheries? Sport fishing or recreational fishing?  Fisheries or fishing? What is the difference? What is a fishery?  The words are confusing especially when used interchangeably. Also, these words have been used differently over time and there have been differences by discipline. I was assigned the task of analyzing the thematic area of sport fishing using papers presented at previous GCFI meetings in the GCFI archives, but chose instead to consider four categories of papers instead: sport fishing (including sports fishing and sport fishing), recreational fishing, sport fisheries, and recreational fisheries. The purpose of this was to focus on the larger more inclusive term of recreational fisheries for analysis purposes. Using the file of papers as a proxy or trend line for recreational fisheries topics from 1949 to the present, a temporal and spatial analysis of papers in this category will be presented. Over the past 58 years, we would expect to find increased attention to the economics of recreational fisheries in recent years. Likewise, we would expect to find more recent attention to particular types of recreational fisheries, i.e., tournaments, charter and party boat fleets, artificial reefs, scuba, etc instead of recreational fisheries in general. Finally, we would expect to find an increasing diversity of researchers from various scientific disciplines involved in this important topic.

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