Mobile hunting, fishing licenses streamline conservation management
Fish are checked-in and weighed during the Brainerd Jaycees Ice Fishing Extravaganza on January 29, 2022, in Brainerd, Minnesota Scott Olson/Getty Images
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Minnesota’s new system will replace a paper-based license purchase and harvest registration process, saving staff time and improving customer service.
To get ready for the 2025 hunting and fishing season, Minnesota is working to digitize its licenses for outdoor recreational activities.
A new cloud-based system will enable applicants to receive digital licenses through a new mobile app, said Jenifer Coleman, strategic business analyst at the Division of Fish and Wildlife in the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, or DNR.
“Customers expect, as technology has certainly advanced, that we should move toward a more modern system,” Coleman said. “They’ll be able to buy a license online and immediately have it in their possession either in a digital format through a mobile app that we will have available,” she said. Customers can also get their licenses via email and then keep a copy on their phones.
For hunting licenses, however, customers have historically had to wait to receive their physical licenses and the tags they place on a harvested animal. They’ll still have to validate their harvest, but the new system will let them do it through their phone.
The changes also make it easier for conservation officers in the field to check for license documentation. Using their mobile devices, they will be able to scan a QR code or barcode on the license and pull up the user’s information. Neither license holders nor officers need internet or cell connection to access or check licenses, Coleman said.
“Sometimes when officers are out in the field, their office is their truck, their vehicle, their fleet, and if they are going remote, then they might take their snowmobile or their boat,” Coleman said. When that happens, “they’re taking a lot of handwritten notes” that they later have to type into their computer system at the office, she said. Besides improving the officers’ efficiency, this mobile application will “provide better customer service because the conservation officer will be able to look up that customer right then and there and see the information they need to see.”
Another benefit she expects the new system to bring is easier residency validation. License pricing varies based on whether the applicant is a Minnesota resident. Historically, new customers have had to visit a DNR office to prove their residency using a physical driver’s license or a piece of mail from, say, their utility company. Next year, DNR will have a data interchange set up with the Department of Public Safety, which handles driver’s licenses. That will make it easier for staff to verify residency.
The new system will also connect with an online event management platform, where people can enroll and pay for the safety training classes that are required for licensure. When someone passes a firearm safety class, for example, the certificate will be linked to their account.
“It will alleviate some of the steps that we have now,” Coleman said. The current process requires those who pass the course to bring a hard copy of their certificate to a DNR location, where an agent enters the information into the system manually.
Anyone who prefers not to use the technology will still be able to go to DNR offices and buy a license in person, but it will be on a piece of 8.5-by-11-inch paper, not a card, she said.
Minnesota is not the first state to digitize its recreational licenses. North Dakota shifted to e-licensing in 2016, Illinois launched a platform in 2021, and California began providing digital sport fishing licenses last month, with plans to add hunting later this year.
As officials consider making this kind of transition, Coleman recommends taking a team approach. DNR worked closely with Minnesota’s Information Technology Services agency, bringing more than 50 people onto the project to ensure that the team had “the breadth and depth” of understanding on all the data, applications and processes being combined in this new system,” she said.
DNR has also kept stakeholders abreast of the process, meeting with registrars, license agents and customers at large, and providing updates through websites such as this one that explains how to prepare for and use the new app and this one, which lays out what to expect.
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