Insightful Anglers
Strengthening conservation and integrity in sportfishing
What is Insightful Anglers?
Insightful Anglers is a self-assessment where you rate your fishing practices. Insightful Anglers is a questionnaire developed so you can work through a series of questions that incorporate the areas and principals of the National Code of Practice for recreational and sportfishing.
Completing the Insightful Anglers questionnaire helps you to stop and reflect about your angling to identify areas where you are doing well and also pinpoint elements you may consider improving.
Insightful Anglers is about fishing practices and behaviors relevant to fisheries conservation, humane dispatch, ethical angling and considering the safety for yourself and others. The very important factors for successful anglers of fishing knowledge, techniques and skills are not covered in this assessment.
What is covered?
Insightful Anglers includes a few introductory questions about the angler and then a bundle of multi-choice questions broken into the stages of a fishing journey including:
- Preparing for your trip
- Getting there and away
- Fishing
- Beyond fishing – making a difference
The areas and principals of the Australian Code of Practice for Sportfishing & Recreational fishing are all covered in these multi-choice questions.
How long will it take?
The online questionnaire will take 10-15 minutes.
Why should I participate in Insightful Anglers?
- Helps to gauge where you are at with a variety of fishing behaviours and practices and where you might consider future improvements
- Combined the results helps gauge the how anglers across Queensland and further afield are tracking
- Combined results for Queensland Sportfishers clubs helps our organization to prioritise activities
How are results stored and used?
Results are stored in a password protected database administered by Queensland Sportfishers. These results will be available for you to access and reflect upon. In future years you may wish to redo the questionnaire and compare this to past results and see how you have progressed as an Insightful Angler.
De-identified data will be used by Queensland Sportfishers to prepare reports that benchmark the practices of anglers who participate. These reports will be summarized into the responses to questions and also into regions.
What’s in the National Code of Practice?
The National Code of Practice for Recreational and Sport Fishing contains four main themes for fishing responsibility:
- Fishing – I will respect and appreciate the fish that I catch
- Stewardship – I will demonstrate care for fish and the environment I fish in through my actions
- Interactions – I will respect other fishers and members of our community
- Habitats – will respect, protect and restore our wildlife habitats
Background Information
Recreational fishing is a pursuit that allows the participant to interact with, appreciate and connect with their natural surroundings. It provides a sustainable healthy food source from natural ecosystems. It allows for social connections and physical activity.
In recent years the recreational fishing sector has come under pressure to demonstrate our care for fishing environments and fish welfare. The recreational fishing sector has been proactive in developing several codes of practice to address this and to support improved understanding and practice.
Queensland Sportfishers (The Queensland branch of the Australian National Sportfishing Association) and member clubs are now moving to build on these codes of practice by developing Insightful Anglers, a self-assessment for our members and other interested anglers. Insightful Anglers enables individuals to explore practices to better understand where they are doing well and areas they might be able to improve.
This approach not only offers individuals an avenue to improve fishing practices, it also provides the recreational fishing industry opportunity to determine sector wide benchmarking. This benchmarking will help to identify priority areas and guide efforts to support sector-wide improvement.
Honest self-assessment is critical to accurate industry benchmarking and to informing fisheries policy, planning and management. To facilitate this individual survey responses must be kept confidential with data from assessments being summarised before public release.
This project is supported by funding from the Queensland Government Department of Agriculture and Fisheries and Fitzroy Basin Association Inc.
