Cold-water fisheries in a warmer world: Increasing temperature redistributes angling effort and concentrates activity...

Climate change is reshaping human-ecosystem interactions. Cold-water fisheries are vulnerable, and anglers are adapting to a warming climate. Using a multi-decadal, multi-lake dataset, we show high air temperatures reduce trip frequency and catch in shallow lakes, but increase trips in deep lakes with larger cold-water habitat. Consequently, total monthly catch falls in shallow lakes and rises in deep lakes. Although deep lakes contain greater thermal refugia, warming concentrates angling effort there because of slightly higher catch rates, increasing exposure of cold-water fishes to angling-related stress and lakes to higher trip frequency. Further, despite depth-related influences of temperature on trips among lakes, we show a weak temperature response among all lakes combined, suggesting climate-related patterns can be strong at local scales and weak at broader scales. Our results reveal climate-driven redistribution of angler effort that likely exacerbates stress on cold-water fisheries.