Predicting spatial patterns of recreational boating to understand potential impacts to fisheries and aquatic ecosystems

Understanding recreational demand in aquatic ecosystems is necessary to relate ongoing environmental change to anthropogenic factors. We investigated whether factors influencing patterns of boating activity by recreational fishers (boat fishers) differed from those of other recreational boaters at Ontario, Canada lakes. Count data from aerial roving creel surveys flown for one year between 2008 and 2012 and across 643 lakes in Ontario indicated that greater accessibility of lakes, lake size, and human development around lakes were associated with higher activity for both boat fishers and other recreational boaters. Other recreational boating activity was greater at lakes with more human development (as measured by the density of docks) and was more concentrated in southern Ontario than was boat fishing activity. Boat fishing activity was greater at larger-sized lakes with tourism establishments and greater walleye biomass densities and less within lakes located in parks than was other recreational boating activity. The reduced importance of human development and increased importance of walleye for boat fishers was associated with boat fishing having a greater spatial footprint than other recreational boating. This different footprint can result in different impacts from the two activities across a large area such as the province of Ontario. Although boat fishers travelled further afield than other recreational boaters, large lakes with tourism establishments were especially attractive to these fishers. Consequently, these lakes are especially susceptible to impacts from boat fishers including the arrival of non-indigenous species. The boat fishing and other recreational boating models had strong predictive power (correlation coefficient > 0.80) when validated with a separate evaluation dataset comprised of 456 lakes and activity counts measured between 2013 and 2017.