Old-fashioned snail mail and a postage stamp might be the answer for federal officials struggling to keep the waters off the U.S. coast from being overfished.
Anglers who fish for fun in U.S. coastal waters say the federal government currently relies on bad data to determine which ocean locales are overfished and subsequently placed off limits to recreational and commercial fishing so stocks can rebuild.
The government through the National Marine Fisheries Service has relied heavily on a home telephone survey since the 1970s to random-digit dial coastal households for information about fishing trips.
Now a pilot study in North Carolina has found a new way to calculate recreational fishing activity in the ocean — and it's proven promising as a method to replace calling people on the phone, according to statistician Lynne Stokes, one of five researchers who conducted the North Carolina pilot study.
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