In May of 2016 we issued a web-based GIS choice experiment that included questions to decipher angler preferences of species fished with harvest limits, user fees, distance between anglers (i.e. crowding), drift-boat use, segments of the river closed to motorized boats and frequency of the closures (Table 1). Previous research has used choice experiments to examine angler preferences (Oh et al. 2007).
Each respondent was given seven choices that included five topics with a mix of options (Table 1) and the option to state they would not fish the Kenai River. For each of the 8 choices the respondent was asked to spatially locate on a map where they would fish by dropping points onto a map. If the person did not want to record GPS locations they could simply choose: Kenai River, in Alaska but outside of the Kenai River, in the United States but outside of Alaska, Canada, Russia, Europe, or they would not fish at all.
Residency, income, and household size was collected for each respondent. Residency was further classified within Alaska to examine behavior and attitudes among Kenai River residents (Kenai Peninsula; n = 110), Southcentral (Anchorage census area and Matanuska-Susitna; n = 317), other (all other Alaska residents; n = 31), North American residents outside of Alaska (n = 916), and outside North America (n = 87). The income was divided into 9 classes from less than $30,000/year to more than $200,000/year. FUTURE: Differences among the classes were assessed with either a t-test or contingency table.
To spatially analyze how the preferences for different management options and species influenced the distribution of anglers we used ArcGIS to calculate point density clouds using a circle radius (1,000 km) and a cell size of 250 m. Several radius sizes were evaluated (1 km, 10 km, 100 km, and 1,000km).
The survey data is available upon request through Jennifer Schmidt (jischmidt0@gmail.com) and Tobias Schwörer (tschwoerer@alaska.edu).
