The population of cod in the western Baltic Sea is in a critical condition and bag limits was implemented in January this year to limit catches from recreational anglers. An angler is restricted to land no more than five fish a day (three during spawning season).

Recreational fishing and fishing tourism offers a great potential for the development local fisheries and coastal areas, but will the introduction of bag limits make recreational fishing less attractive and deter fishing tourism?

This project aims to study potential effects of bag limits for recreational fisheries on fishing tourism. Using data on landings from tourist fishing boats, we describe the situation in Öresund and discuss potential effects of bag limits for recreational fisheries in relation to previous studies.

The project is a co-operation between AgriFood, the Department of Biology at Lund University, and the Department of Aquatic Resources at SLU. The project is expected to be completed during 2017.