If you have an Alabama saltwater fishing license or are on the saltwater registry, don’t be surprised if you get a call with a caller ID of the University of South Alabama (USA) or Alabama Creel, AL Creel for short. The Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources’ (ADCNR) Marine Resources Division (MRD) has partnered with USA to conduct a portion of the AL Creel survey that provides the data needed for fisheries management decisions.
Kevin Anson, MRD Director, said the creel survey is very close to the survey methodology used by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries for its saltwater creel survey (LA Creel), which began in 2012. Anson hopes AL Creel will be accredited for official use by NOAA Fisheries, aka the National Marine Fisheries Service, just as LA Creel was accredited. This new effort is an extension of previous surveys done by MRD to determine the number of anglers and number of trips (effort) taken in Alabama waters and in the Alabama artificial reef zones.
“Actually, we have been doing the effort portion of the survey for a little while,” Anson said. “We were calling licensed anglers for their trip information on a weekly basis. We started that in 2024. Then in 2025, we continued the weekly phone calling of randomly selected anglers from our license list and added a dockside survey.”…