Abstracts

Presented by Luke Laborde - Email: llabor2@lsu.edu

A post-season mail survey is conducted annually by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) to estimate hunter activity and harvest of all legal game species. Following the 2017-2018 season, LDWF conducted a single mailing delivered to 15,273 randomly-selected Louisiana licensed hunters. We developed an identical e-mail survey using Qualtrics survey software, obtained LSU AgCenter IRB approval (#HE17-6), and distributed the survey in 3 waves to all available emails (67,045) after exclusion of hunters selected in the random mail sample. Response rates to the e-mail and mail survey were 22.7% and 23.5% respectively. Importantly, 16.4% of email survey respondents and 37.9% of mail survey respondents did not hunt during the 2017-2018 season, and these responses were deleted from further analysis. The average age of valid respondents was different, 46.4 years and 54.7 years for the e-mail and mail surveys, respectively. Results for days-hunted and harvest were empirically similar for deer, turkey, waterfowl, and small game, but not for hog hunting. Despite the empirically similarities, binary logistic regression identifies significant ( = .05) differences in the age classes and days hunted between e-mail and mail survey respondents. In addition, the e-mail results under-represented and the mail results over-represented hunters over the age of 55 in comparison to the population of 273,409 licensed Louisiana hunters (average age 50.0 years). Both survey methods provided good geographic representation of the Louisiana hunter population. The average cost per valid response was $1.26 and $6.37 for the e-mail and mail surveys, respectively. E-mail distribution provides the opportunity to inexpensively engage many more hunters, and e-mail respondents were more representative of the population of Louisiana licensed hunters. This study is being replicated, and consolidated analysis of data from the 2016-2017, 2017-2018, and 2018-2019 post season surveys will commence this fall.