Fish age estimation is a fundamental component for fisheries management, but poor practices and improper training may lead to widespread mismanagement for both exploited fisheries and native species in need of conservation. Our collaborative team recognized these challenges and with support from a Multistate Conservation Grant in 2023 created FishAge, www.fishage.org, an online repository of calcified structures from known-age fishes. Through the support from the 2023 Multistate Conservation Grant, we were able to collect over 1,000 known-age structures from 12 different species. These structures were processed and digitized to be freely available for viewing on our newly constructed website. We have received overwhelming positive feedback on the website with helpful suggestions on how to better serve fisheries biologists across the nation. Therefore, we aim to build on the momentum created with the 2023 Multistate Conservation Grant through efforts to include additional structures, build user friendly features to our website and incorporate educational materials for an all-inclusive website aimed at learning the science of age estimation. Our intent is to submit proposals through the Multistate Conservation Grant program over the next three years to sequentially obtain our goals. This proposal will fund activities centered around the collection and processing of additional known-age fish, tagging newly stocked fish species for additional known-age fish in the future, and incorporating educational material such as instructional videos to fishage.org. After obtaining our 3-year goal we envision fishage.org to be an integral resource for anyone looking to learn the science of age estimation. Through promotional efforts during this period, we are confident that this resource will be well known and widely used among all state and federal fish and wildlife agencies and incorporated into classroom instruction at universities around the country.
FishAge 2.0: A National Resource for Age Estimation and Training
Fiscal Year
2026
Organization
American Fisheries Society
Grant Number
F26AP00377
Categories
Tool Development, Training
R3
No