In many fisheries, fishermen innovate actively to increase their catch by adding new technologies like fish finders or inventing new gears and fishing practices. If your fishery is like this, you should adjust fishing effort estimates accordingly because catch per unit of effort like hours at sea or soak time of the gear will likely increase over time because of these innovations. You can either estimate the rate of innovation that increases catch per unit effort directly yourself, or use the simple model included in this paper to estimate it. The model is based on empirical observations of the rate of technological creep in many fisheries around the world, mostly industrialized temperate water fisheries but including some tropical small-scale fisheries.
