Recreational fisheries activities and management in national parks: A global perspective

National parks occur in most nations around the globe and tend to have a dual role of protecting natural heritage features while also providing opportunities for the public to interact with natural areas through recreation and leisure. National parks are afforded varying degrees of protection with recreational fishing allowed in some form within the boundaries of some parks. However, little is known about the extent to which recreational fishing occurs in national parks or the types of regulations that govern the activity. Vast differences in data availability exist throughout the world (partly related to language barriers and institutional capacity), limiting our understanding of the various uses of national parks. Acknowledging these limitations, we sought to consider the extent of recreational fisheries activities and their management within national parks around the globe. Using the World Database on Protected Areas, we selected the countries that had International Union for the Conservation of Nature type II areas. Within those countries, we investigated national parks that permitted recreational fishing in freshwater and/or marine systems and cataloged information on fisheries regulations, such as size limits and catch quotas. Overall, an equal number of 195 countries allowed some form of recreational fishing within their national parks as the number of countries which did not report any data on recreational fishing at all. Meanwhile, recreational fishing was forbidden in only a few countries with IUCN II national parks. For countries with information available, we found high adoption of recreational fisheries regulations, with the majority of countries requiring specialized park fishing licenses and that all fish be released (i.e., exclusively catch-and-release), though for many countries this information was not reported. The lack of information retrieved on recreational fishing in national parks may reflect search bias or lack of such regulations. Our study highlights the need for better sharing of approaches for the management of recreational fishing in national parks to improve the collective understanding of management practices associated with this activity in protected areas and to learn from successes and failures in different jurisdictions.