Lake Sturgeon monitoring and a request for your opinion...

[gaspergou]

For at least the past eight years, TWRA has been monitoring Lake Sturgeon catches by recreational fishermen by asking folks that catch a sturgeon to call a TWRA employee. By all accounts this has been a successful program, but has required an increasing amount of staff time as the number of sturgeon being caught increases. We're happy that this is becoming a problem!

The Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute is trying to create a reporting system for Lake Sturgeon sightings by fishermen. One option is to use the existing platform iNaturalist (https://www.inaturalist.org/), since it is easy to upload photos and other locality information. However, users would be required to create a separate login. Another option is a short webform on the Aquarium website, but you wouldn’t be able to upload photos and there would be less information associated with the catch. Aquarium staff are afraid that creating a separate login might prevent people from reporting the information, though they’d prefer using the iNaturalist system -- if you're not familiar with it, it's a great site! As far as I know, there will still be a certificate of appreciation issued for each report regardless of which reporting scheme gets used.

Do you have a preference? If you were to catch a Lake Sturgeon, would a certificate of appreciation be enough of an incentive to login to iNaturalist to report it?

Many thanks.

 

[rsimms]

Are you saying TWRA is trying to hand off the reporting completely? Can't quite tell from what you've written.

If not, in my humble opinion, creating two avenues of reporting (TWRA AND inaturalist) would create confusion.

Someone would also need to do some close monitoring and cross-checking to insure reports are not duplicates, and/or integrate reports that are reported to one platform, but not the other.

Just sort of feels like wasted effort to me that could potentially cause even more work and potential confusion. I think it would be best to use the one existing platform (TWRA) and call it done. At least until the day when they're so common that we don't care if they get reported or not.

But that's just me. emoAngel

 

[gaspergou]

The problem is that more than one agency is involved anyway. We've got fish that are moving downstream into Alabama and possibly even Kentucky. Georgia has an extensive stocking program in the Coosa. Missouri started stocking fish a couple years before we did, and just this past spring documented reproduction by those reintroduced fish in the wild! The eventual goal is to replace the current reporting systems with a single platform that makes it easier to integrate observations from recreational fishermen with multi-agency survey data.

iNaturalist may not be the best solution, but it would be very helpful knowing if recreational fishermen are willing to use it before we invest a lot of time and effort into the change.

 

[gaspergou]

Thanks for the input, Richard. The new website is live.

icaughtone.org

You can either submit an observation directly, or go through iNaturalist to be able to upload photos or other info. You can also still call TWRA for now...