Sarasota Bay fishery resource assessment. Final project report.

Abstract

The Sarasota Bay National Estuary Program was established with seven primary goals, one of which was "To restore and sustain fish and other living resources in Sarasota Bay.". This paper describes the results of a project with a goal of providing information on fishery resources located within Sarasota Bay that can be used to help guide development of actions for inclusion in the Sarasota Bay NEP and Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan, and allow evaluation of such actions. The goal was to gather baseline information for commercial and recreational fisheries and for fish populations and habitat relationships. Methods used to gather this information included a bay-wide ichthyological characterization survey, which consisted of a seining survey of shoreline and fringing habitats and a trawling survey of deeper habitats. The recreational fisheries were characterized by a bay-wide creel survey gathered primarily by volunteers and professional fishing guides who logged catch and effort information. The project also included scoping tasks designed to assess the potential of obtaining separated commercial landings data for Sarasota Bay fish populations in the future. Additionally, historical data previously collected by Mote were assembled and provided as part of the project's characterization of Sarasota Bay fish and fisheries. The fish and fisheries studied included both finfish and important crustacean shellfish.