Presence and Quality of Catch and Release Information and Guidelines on Fishing Tourism Operators' Websites in Sweden

Sammanfattning: Abstract: Recreational fishing is one of popular outdoor activities and a growing business in Sweden. However, preceding researches had shown that recreational fisheries may contribute to overfishing as much as commercial fisheries. One of the ways to reduce anglers’ impact on fish populations is the practice of releasing caught fish (catch and release; C&R). C&R is often seen as an ethical and sustainable way of fishing that supports fish conservation. Anglers may obtain C&R information and guidelines from different sources, such as fishing club, fishing magazines, state agencies. As the internet is increasingly becoming an important source for anglers to obtain updated fishing information, fishing tourism operators could be a principal actor to provide C&R information and guidelines through their websites. At the same time there is lack of information on the presence and quality of C&R information at Swedish websites. As international tourists are important group of anglers that use tourism operators’ services, and due to the language limitation of the author, this study focused on websites in English language. Therefore, this study aimed at investigating the presence and quality of C&R information and guidelines in English language provided by fishing tourism operators’ websites in Sweden. The study followed the quantitative content analysis approach by assigning categories and counting the frequencies in the text found on the fishing tourism operators’ websites. First, the websites were scanned to check if C&R information was present. Then, the number of clicks needed to retrieve this information was counted to measure its accessibility. Finally, a C&R information quality score was calculated by adding up scores based on different type and quality of the information found on the websites, including 12 criteria of the C&R best practice guidelines developed by Sims and Danylchuk (2017). The study found that 66 out of 151 analyzed websites provided C&R information and guidelines which generally easily  accessed (two clicks on average). However, in general the websites had a low average quality score of the C&R information and guidelines. Moreover, there was a high variability in how the information was presented on the websites, suggesting lack of standardized guidelines that fishing tourism operators could refer to. Consequently, there is a need to encourage and support more fishing tourism operators to provide a high quality C&R information and guidelines on their websites.