Best practices for understanding recreational fishers

Abstract

In this closing chapter of our edited book, we summarize what we believe are best practices for understanding recreational fishers. Fishers are an integral part of the recreational fishery social-ecological system, and we emphasize the importance of placing them in that context. We begin with an overview of the process of developing a project and conclude with some broad suggestions for standardising approaches to gather data from and about fishers, mainly focusing on social science methods. Throughout, we emphasize tactics to promote the development of inter- and transdisciplinary tools and processes, as a means of more fully understanding the full social-ecological system. This chapter draws from methodological details and suggestions developed throughout this book; we describe how they work together but point the reader to these specific chapters to further understand how to build interdisciplinarity into research and management.