A typology of recreational sea anglers in England and Wales

Understanding diversity among anglers is a key aspect of effective fishery management. Typologies are coherent models best describing heterogeneity in populations and have been used extensively to understand sea angler responses to management and policy. Typologies can also aid the assessment of bias in non-probabilistic sampling, as part of recreational sea angling monitoring, through the inclusion of metrics beyond those based on days fished, location and gear. There is no standard approach to the formation of typologies and, historically, the UK has lacked a suitable description of recreational sea angler diversity to inform both sector monitoring and the development of fishery policy post-Brexit. This study developed and employed a wide-ranging data collection framework to form the first ever typology of recreational sea anglers in England and Wales. The typology is based on principal component and cluster analysis of 472 angler survey questionnaires, follow-up interviews, and was validated using a unique qualitative verification method. Variance was represented by ten components reflecting variable groupings across the data collection framework. Drawing on the components and several independent validating variables, the typology comprised: consumers; trophy anglers; leisure-identity anglers; and social anglers. Value-based and attitudinal metrics performed better than behavioural variables. Domains of angler ‘involvement’ showed strong performance as markers of variance in the sample. Specialisation variables proved less useful as summary indices that reflected sample variance. Methodological suggestions are provided for integrating the typology in future monitoring assessments in addition to applied examples of how the typology informs the implementation of management measures.