Lake Champlain United - Forums

Hello everyone,

My name is Jonah Withers and I am a fish biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service working on Atlantic salmon restoration in Lake Champlain. I apologize for not connecting with this community earlier but with some recent changes in personnel and responsibilities within the program, I am hoping to engage with anglers more regularly.

As some of you may know, members of the Lake Champlain Fish and Wildlife Management Cooperative collected angler diaries from the 1970s until 2019. The program was discontinued because we were not collecting enough information for the data to be used as a reliable management tool. This was mainly due to low participation and missing data entries within diaries.

We are interested in reestablishing the angler diaries and possibly making it more accessible in the hopes that access may promote participation and complete submissions.

These data have the potential to be an important indicator mangers use to make management decisions. If you would be willing to provide data on your fishing trips such as start time, end time, and species caught could please fill out this 4 question survey below?

https://forms.office.com/Pages/Response ... FCVVVUSy4u


Thank you all very much. And happy fishing!
Jonah

Will do Jonah! I will start a separate spreadsheet with the data collected you need and send to you Christmas time.

This data is important for the future of our fisheries in with decisions and studies moving forward. Let's get everyone involved this year! Spread the word!

Welcome Jonah. Hoping we can get 100 LCU members to help collect data this season to help the Lake Management Team.

Welcome aboard Johnah hopefully this season, with the boarder open and Covid currently declining we can get high volumes of input from anglers from all over.

Seems there was a better yearling population last fall than previous years IMHO. So we should see a good spring and summer compared to previous years. But with fleas, low water, alewives, and cormorants who knows…

Thanks for reaching out. This group of fisherman will love to hear from you and be able to ask questions.

Fish on.

Matt

I did the survey. I'm assuming this is just to gather information on weather there is enough interest to launch the program or not? I never had to enter my name or anything.

I'd highly suggest we all do this. I hear complaints of salmon population being small all of the time. Giving these guys real world data on what's going on out there would be giving them a tool to work with to fight that problem. The fish and wildlife guys may be the only people around who want a booming population of game fish more than we do.

Count me in!