The Angler Postal Survey (APS) is an annual survey of the state's licenced anglers. The survey has been running continuously since 1986-87 angling season.

Each year the IFS sends out 5,000 questionnaires to randomly selected anglers from our licence database. We aim to get back 1,000 of these questionnaires detailing where an angler has fished and what they have caught. While the questionnaires are anonymous they detail the anglers age, licence type, how they have fished (fly, bait or lure) and the time they spend fishing from a boat.

The information we collect from the surveys assists in fisheries management. Importantly we can work out how many anglers visit a particular water, the catch rate, effort and harvest from that water can then be calculated.

For season 2015-16 we produced a report summarising the results from the APS. This report can be found here.

The report on the 2016-17 APS has been published and can be found here.