Promoting the Quality of Data on Marine Recreational Fishing

High quality data are essential for managing marine recreational fisheries, sustaining fish stocks, and supporting transparent, science-based decision making. As fishing practices evolve and more states contribute data to national systems, ensuring consistency, reliability, and usability across surveys has become increasingly important.

Promoting the Quality of Data on Marine Recreational Fishing presents an independent evaluation of the data quality standards established by the Marine Recreational Information Program. Conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine at the request of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the report finds the standards to be well designed and largely aligned with federal and professional best practices, while identifying opportunities to strengthen them and plan for emerging methods and future needs. The report offers guidance on standards for survey design, quality assurance, transparency, transition planning, and data access, and explores how advances such as artificial intelligence, model-based methods, and spatial-temporal approaches could further enhance data quality over time. These findings support continued improvement of recreational fishing data that underpin sustainable fisheries management and public trust.