Recreational fishing brings $14bn a year and 120,000 jobs
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) and its charitable arm, the Fish and Wildlife Foundation of Florida (FWFF), have announced the creation of a “coastal corridor” — an interconnected chain of ocean-based projects and enhancements designed to preserve and nourish vulnerable marine creatures. Featuring habitat restoration, fisheries enhancement and improved public access and coastal resilience along Florida’s Atlantic and Gulf coasts, the project aims to create a connected network of artificial reefs, oyster beds, seagrass and mangroves on which marine life can thrive.
The initiative replicates to a significant degree the state’s wildlife corridor, an 18m-acre (7m-hectare) project established in 2021 to provide a safe, contiguous habitat spanning much of Florida where rare or threatened land-based species including birds, reptiles, panthers and bears can flourish. “The goal is to protect and connect all these important habitats for fish and wildlife,” said Nick Wiley, the former head of FWC who was appointed in April as executive director of FWFF.
Wiley said the foundation’s board was inspired by the wildlife corridor’s success. “Everyone has seen how successful the wildlife corridor initiative has been, rallying everybody around the mission,” he said. “Our board members were really inspired by that, looking at our coast, our fisheries and the coastal communities, and from the beaches, estuaries, all the way out into the deeper water.”
Florida’s marine life faces a slate of climate-related pressures, including disappearing manatees, bleached coral reefs, gender-changing turtles and oyster beds destroyed by hurricanes. Wildlife authorities said they are attempting to bring cohesion to the response by borrowing from a playbook that has already proved successful on land.
The corridor is designed to protect not only Florida’s marine legacy but also the economic value of its waters. Recreational fishing alone brings in $14bn a year and provides 120,000 jobs, the foundation said. Another $3.1bn and 39,000 jobs come from creating and maintaining artificial reefs, the foundation said, and more than 2 million out-of-state anglers visit Florida each year, renting charter boats and spending at hotels and restaurants.
“If you had to list what sets Florida apart and makes it such an iconic place for people to go and enjoy the outdoors, and the water and the fish and everything, our coast is our treasure,” Wiley said. He said the state had not previously looked at its coastline as a connected corridor, describing the new initiative as “the wildlife corridor’s sister on the coast.”
Wiley said the corridor unites work already under way by partners from local government, non-profit, federal government and state. “This pulls us all together under one great umbrella to inspire and provide a vision that we can all celebrate and leverage, and identify where we need to do better, make improvements, where we need to restore places and where we need to add habitat, from coral reefs all the way up to the grass flats,” he said.
FWC and FWFF leaders are partnering with local governments, scientists, reef builders, conservation organizations and coastal communities. One early project, planned for next month, is a collaboration with Collier county to lay a sizable new artificial reef some 13 miles from shore in the Gulf of Mexico. Mike Norberg, a marine biologist with decades of experience in artificial reefs who also serves as the coastal corridor’s project director, said a chain of prefabricated concrete structures 8ft-15ft would be lowered onto the seabed to mimic natural reefs and attract fish.
Norberg said strategic reef deployments are a priority for the first year. “There’s a number of benefits for artificial reefs,” he said. “It removes pressure from natural reefs, which obviously have a lot of ongoing challenges, especially in south Florida, and also creates habitats in areas where none might have existed.” In parts of the coastal waters, he said, the sea floor is largely sand with few natural reefs, especially in the northern Gulf and off the north-eastern side of Florida, making the deployments “a win-win both for the ecosystem as well as recreational access opportunities, whether that’s fishing and diving or just going out and sightseeing and having fun.”
Other projects are under way in Okaloosa county in the Panhandle and Duvall county on the northern Atlantic coast, Norberg said. Future plans include exploring coastal restoration projects to help address beach erosion, the loss of coastal mangroves that protect against storm surge during tropical events and the reduction in natural food stocks that sustain declining species, such as seagrass for manatees. “We’re looking at various oyster bed restoration opportunities and how that can help tie in to this network of connected habitats, living shorelines,” he said. “It also provides habitat for juvenile fish and adult fish to spend their time within an estuary before they move offshore. So there really is this opportunity to tie both inshore to offshore habitats and use that as a tool for marine resource management.”
Wiley said the corridor represents a peak of his decades-long career in wildlife conservation in Florida. “I see more excitement and opportunity on this one than anything I’ve touched,” he said. “It speaks to me so well in my heart about bringing people together to do great things for Florida’s environment and Florida’s coast, and I just see so much potential and opportunity for everybody to come in and be a part of it.” “As we’ve seen on the wildlife corridor,” he said, “it will bring a deeper, richer identity to the state that will enrich and enhance the value of Florida for people that live here, and the people that want to come visit.”