| Summary: | The Alaska Department of Public Safety, Division of Alaska Wildlife Troopers is tasked with patrolling a number of domains related to wildlife in Alaska. They provide statewide patrol of commercial big game services, commercial fisheries, sport fish and sport fish guiding, game hunting and trapping, boating safety, and habitat protection including permit compliance. The regulations which are enforced by the Alaska Wildlife Troopers (AWT) are outlined in the Alaska Administrative Code (AAC). As part of the State of Alaska Salmon and People Project, data on violations and enforcement of salmon-related regulations were gathered. These data provide useful insight into the governance and regulation of salmon fisheries in the state, including where violations occur and what the nature of those violations are. Patterns in violation numbers through time and space are not necessarily indicative of changing behavior of fishers through time or in different locations. There are many contributing factors that could lead to a change in the number of violations, the most important of which is the amount of time the AWT is able to patrol. A number of factors influence where and when the AWT conducts enforcement activities, including the number of personnel available, the annual budget, and guidance from other state departments such as the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. For this reason, included in this dataset is not only a list of salmon-related violations, but also contextual information on the staffing of the division. Important to note is although a certain number of positions are authorized each year in the division by the state legislature, for a variety of reasons not all of these positions are filled. When considering temporal trends in the number of violations, this is an important factor to consider, thus the AWT_troopers_positions_filled.csv includes information on the number of filled positions from 2013-2017 in the month of July for each of these years.
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