Trapper Support
Crab Team supports green crab trappers and managers from more than 40 partner management organizations, including state and federal agencies, tribes and other groups. In coordination with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, we provide training, consultations, and resources that build technical capacity to manage green crab in Washington.
Trapping groups have paid, professional staff who coordinate and implement large-scale trapping programs. Trappers must carry their own permits and liability for the work. If you are interested in supporting green crab management efforts as a volunteer, please check out the Molt Search and monitoring network programs.
Training for Trappers
Combining classroom education and multi-day field demonstrations, trapper training provides professional trappers with the information, best practices, and practical guidance they need to efficiently and effectively trap green crabs. Training is designed for professional management staff at federal and state agencies, tribes and other groups.
Co-presented alongside staff from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, training covers on-the-ground know-how like species identification, and gear use and deployment. They also cover big-picture strategy, including how to target green crab based on their biology and ecology, select trapping strategies that align with management goals, and collect and use data.
If you are a trapper interested in training, email crabteam@uw.edu.
Consultations for Trappers
Consultations are structured, one-on-one conversations that help management partners develop strategies and tactics to manage green crab. In consultations, partners identify their short- and long-term management goals for green crab and assess the available staff time and resources to support management.
We then help partners select appropriate trapping strategies based on their goals and capacity. We also help partners build budgets and understand the permitting requirements for this work.
If you are a trapper interested in a consultation, email crabteam@uw.edu.
Resources for Trappers
Identification Resources
GREEN CRAB IDENTIFICATION TUTORIAL. This video tutorial by Marine Ecologist Emily Grason provides a concise overview of how to identify European green crab.
IDENTIFICATION GUIDE. This six-page guide helps monitors identify the most common animals encountered during surveys.
For much more detailed resources on identifying the broad range of species commonly encountered during trapping, visit the Monitor Toolbox.
European Green Crab Management Tools
This web application, developed by Abigail Keller, helps managers plan for an early detection assessment and, after an assessment, interpret the results based on trapping, eDNA, or a combination of methods.
The assessment planning tool allows trappers to figure out the necessary effort to detect green crab presence as well as the lowest detectable true capture rate.
The assessment interpretation tool allows trappers to calculate how certain they can be that green crab is not in the area if none were found during a survey, and, conversely, estimate how large a population of green crab is based on the number of crabs detected.
Together these tools can help trappers make decisions based on their priorities. Their priorities could include trapping a certain number of green crabs, increasing confidence of green crab absence, or accounting for logistical constraints such as limited time or traps.
Trappers can access these tools on the European Green Crab Management Tools application page. For a better understanding of how to use the app, check out the user guide.
The software package eDNAjoint, also developed by Keller, jointly models eDNA and traditional observations in a Bayesian framework, and can be used to model other methods and systems.
Trappers’ Summit
[photo from summit]
We host the annual Green Crab Trappers’ Summit for trappers who participate in regionally coordinated management trapping. The workshop brings trapping groups from across the state together to share their data, debrief from the past season, learn trapping approaches and interpretation strategies, and identify information and logistical needs related to their work. This community of practice started meeting in 2021 and has grown with the community of trapping practitioners ever since.