From shorelines to social media: Mixed-methods insights into urban fishing practices, policy gaps and culture in the digital age

Recreational and subsistence fishing are globally significant components of coastal social-ecological systems, contributing to food security, cultural identity, and human wellbeing. Yet monitoring coverage across these sectors is highly uneven, with the resulting data gaps constraining managers' ability to design effective regulatory interventions and anticipate their consequences across different geographies and user groups. In California's San Francisco Bay Area, conventional assessments rarely differentiate between different types of recreational and subsistence practices. This is especially true for shore- and pier-based fishing communities, whose activities remain largely invisible to the top-down monitoring and stakeholder processes through which state law directs managers to account for fishing-dependent communities. Addressing this gap, we present a mixed-methods approach, combining semi-structured interviews with a 10-year database of ~40,000 Instagram posts (2014–2023), to document differences in behavior, knowledge, and meaning across regional recreational and subsistence fishing subcultures. Among the digitally active fishing communities studied, our results challenge the assumption that resource interactions are marginal or unstructured, revealing diverse motivations, strategic species targeting, rich place-based knowledge, and rapid in-season adaptations to regulatory and ecological shocks (e.g., sector-specific effort displacement following the 2023 salmon fishery closure). In illustrating the strengths and limitations of Instagram and similar platforms in characterizing overlooked patterns of fisheries participation, we argue that user-generated digital data can serve as a scalable, cost-effective source of Essential Fishery Information (EFI), helping managers to track dynamic human behaviors in near-real time, anticipate the distributional impacts of management actions, and better meet their obligations to advance equitable and adaptive governance.