Psychological Commitment of Freshwater Anglers and its Relation to their Preferences for Stocking and Other Management Actions

Understanding stakeholder diversity can help natural resource managers tailor activities to achieve greater stakeholder satisfaction. Stakeholder diversity can be described by the concept of recreational specialization. Centrality-to-lifestyle, one subdimension of specialization that measures the psychological importance of a recreational activity to an angler, has been shown to explain many human dimensions and behaviors of recreational fishers and to correlate with preferences for management actions. We surveyed 9,911 anglers in Florida, USA to examine how centrality-to-lifestyle relates to preferences for stocking and other management tools. We found that most anglers support stocking and that anglers of greater centrality-to-lifestyle had more positive views towards stocking than less central anglers. Participants, regardless of level of centrality-to-lifestyle, generally preferred stocking of one species, Florida largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides), and they preferred habitat management above stocking, with no relation to centrality. The results suggest stocking can improve satisfaction of anglers of all commitment levels, but that habitat improvement could do so even more. Managers might consider prioritizing habitat management over stocking in systems where natural recruitment is ample to increase overall angler satisfaction, and that anglers will, on average, support such actions independent of the degree of centrality.