Thanks — Sports fishing

This concerns the use of surface water for sport fishing purposes. Sports fishing is an important form of outdoor recreation and nature experience. An estimated 1.27 million Dutch fish on average more than 7 times a year (Hammen & De Graaf, 2013) in inland waterways. Nationally, there are 506,000 fishing fishermen affiliated with an angling association and an additional 81,000 sports fishermen are not affiliated but do own a Small VISpas. It is a growing form of recreation, since 2006 the number of affiliated sports fishermen has increased by 44 % (Sport Fishing Netherlands, 2014). Sport fishing generates an economic turnover of more than 700 million euros on an annual basis and high levels of employment (www.sportvisserijnederland.nl). The angling associations work together nationwide under the umbrella of Sportfishing Netherlands. For fishing, sports fishermen depend on good fish levels, access to the water and legal permission to fish the water. There is therefore a great deal of regional cooperation with water managers and local authorities who often bear the responsibility for these three factors. This cooperation often takes place within fish stocks management committees (www.visstandbeheercommissie.nl). Since the introduction of the Water Framework Directive (WFD), the water quality of surface water and the parameter fish in particular has become increasingly important. Since the water manager is responsible for improving water quality by the WFD, a lot of investments are made by Water Boards in achieving the ecological goals. Since 2011, the Netherlands has been conducting research into the use of the larger waters in the Netherlands by sport fishing. For most of these waters, the use of sport fishing has been identified (Sport Fishing Netherlands, 2014). In sports fishing, there is also a lot of research into fish stocks. Furthermore, sports fishermen themselves can register their catches via http://www.mijnvismaat.nl. This website uses 90,000 sports fishermen to keep track of their catches, more than 800,000 catches are recorded (www.mijnvismaat.nl). The sport fishing for pike takes place all over the Netherlands but the number of reported catches is higher in the WFD water bodies in the least populated part. In the map, pike catches are linked to the WFD water quality test of linear, flowing and still sweet waters (types R5, R6, R7, R8, R9, R10, R11, R12, R13, R14, R15, R16, R17 and R18 and M1 to M10). When testing the R and M water types according to the water quality, the better the water quality (good and moderate), the higher the pike catch. Poor water quality (untourage and bad) generally results in a low pike catch. The exception is the Utrecht region (Woerden) where good pike catches are recorded in water of poor water quality.