A condition for designing bus-route type access site surveys to estimate recreational fishing effort

A theoretical framework for using bus-route surveys to estimate recreational fishing effort has been established by taking into account the arrival and departure distributions of the fishing parties. Properties of a fishing effort estimator proposed by Robson and Jones (1989) are investigated. It is found that the estimator is not automatically unbiased; rather, a condition on the survey design has to be satisfied in order to be unbiased. The condition is simple and can be easily implemented.