Help design a fishing log book smart phone app

The Government agency, Cefas, is working with EA and Angling Trust to engage anglers as citizen scientists to map the distribution and health of freshwater and marine fish — click HERE for a  a background document.

To achieve this, the partnership is developing a free electronic logbook (smartphone app) as a reporting platform, which they hope anglers will also find valuable for recording their fishing experiences. To help them design an app that will be both useful for science and for anglers, a survey is running to establish what data anglers currently collect for themselves, how much they value different types of information and how willing they would be to share this data.

The survey has had over 500 responses since it opened in November and a preliminary analysis of survey responses has indicated that over 90% of the data collected by anglers could potentially be available to science, providing anglers can be assured that sensitive information relating to catch location, tactics and your photographs are treated confidentially. 

One of the key aims is to collect information on fish health: this will help to improve fishery and fish health management and potentially mitigate the impact of fish diseases. Interestingly, nearly 60% of anglers responding to the survey are already recording their observations of fish health — and half of these consider this information to be essential for their records.

The survey results have been used to make sure anglers will be able to capture their key requirements for a logbook in the early release beta app that will be available for download within 6 months, and aims to incorporate many of the suggestions made for additional functionality in future development. 

The survey will remain open over the coming months, so please add your voice to the requirements gathering process if you haven’t already done so: http://​goo​.gl/​5​Ykcin