Heat, hurricanes, and health: Effects of natural disturbances on angling effort

Abstract

Recreational angling is a very popular outdoor activity that is weather-dependent, although investigations of this relationship are rare. This study used weekly fishing effort (2015-2021) estimates throughout coastal Louisiana to understand how effort changed in response to weather conditions. Although we found evidence for some effect of all the weather variables, temperature reported the greatest number of monthly effects, along with an overall declining effect throughout the year. We also examined how tropical storms and hurricanes reduce fishing effort, but that effort recovers rapidly after the storm. Finally, we examined fishing effort during the first year of the pandemic (2020) compared to previous years and found some monthly increases exceeding 100% of normal effort. Understanding angler motivations remains an important part of fishery management, and in a future with changes to weather, hurricanes, and global health crises, we can now know more about how environmental factors change angling effort.

Fig 1

(A) LDWF coastal study areas (Credit: wlf.louisiana.gov). (B) National Weather Service forecast zones within southern Louisiana and adjacent coastal waters. Red zones are administered by the Lake Charles NWSFO whereas blue zones are under the jurisdiction of the Slidell/New Orleans NWSFO. Onshore zones generally correspond to parish political boundaries, except in some coastal parishes where the parish is divided into an inner, land-centric forecast zones and an outer, coastal zone.

Fig 2. Annual cycles of effort-weighted meteorological variables for the 2015–2021 study period for each coastal region.

Dark lines represent the 7-yr locally weighted scatterplot smooth (LOESS) and shaded regions correspond to the 95% confidence interval.

Fig 3. Standardized monthly effect estimates by region for precipitation, small craft advisories, temperature, and maximum wind speed.

In each of the eight panels the point represents the estimated mean monthly effect and the intersecting line segment represents the 95% credible interval. Points and lines in red indicate monthly estimates that are not credibly 0, while light blue points and lines indicate estimates that with 95% credible intervals overlapping 0. The black line in both temperature panels represents the level 2 regression on the effect of temperature throughout the calendar year.

Fig 4

A) Angling effort in the weeks after tropical cyclone landfall. Each panel represents an individual storm that made landfall in Louisiana during our study. Black dots represent effort estimates (on a log scale) in the region corresponding to landfall. The gray lines represent the linear regression fit to the points, with non-significant regression lines in blue and one significant regression line in red. B) Overall slope of recovery effort regressed against tropical cyclone severity. The coefficient estimates of the individual storm recovery regression lines (shown in panel A) are represented by black dots. Estimates are plotted by the category of the storm, with zero representing a tropical storm and 1–4 representing hurricane strength. The black line is the regression of the 12 effort slopes against storm category.

Fig 5. Angling effort in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The top two panels show monthly angling effort estimates (by region) during the pandemic year (2020) compared to pre-pandemic angling effort. The dark red line representing 2020 effort does not have any uncertainty because each month is a single estimate, while the pre-pandemic monthly estimates are represented by the blue line with the shaded blue polygon representing the range of effort estimates. The lower two panels show monthly pandemic effort as a percentage of normal (pre-pandemic) effort. Bars with red shading indicate greater pandemic effort than normal effort while blue bars indicate greater normal effort than pandemic effort (with the intensity of color simply representing the magnitude of the difference). At the bottom of the lower panels, for reference, is an inset of monthly COVID cases across all Louisiana (not broken down by region).