Recreational angling is a very popular outdoor activity that is weather-dependent, although investigations of this relationship are rare. This study used weekly fishing effort (2015-2021) estimates throughout coastal Louisiana to understand how effort changed in response to weather conditions. Although we found evidence for some effect of all the weather variables, temperature reported the greatest number of monthly effects, along with an overall declining effect throughout the year. We also examined how tropical storms and hurricanes reduce fishing effort, but that effort recovers rapidly after the storm. Finally, we examined fishing effort during the first year of the pandemic (2020) compared to previous years and found some monthly increases exceeding 100% of normal effort. Understanding angler motivations remains an important part of fishery management, and in a future with changes to weather, hurricanes, and global health crises, we can now know more about how environmental factors change angling effort.
Copyright: © 2023 Midway, Miller. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.