The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), fishery management councils, and states rely on fishery data to make decisions regarding the stewardship of the Nation's living marine resources.  Citizens of the United States also rely on fishery statistics to make decisions regarding their participation, investment in, and use of commercial and recreational fisheries.  In addition, fishery statistics can be used to measure how effectively governmental agencies are meeting stewardship goals and objectives.  The quality of resource stewardship decisions and the predictability of the outcomes are strongly dependent on the quality of the data being used.


Given the increasing complexity of fisheries management, the current state of fisheries statistics needs to be greatly improved.  Despite some regional successes, it is clear that the current overall approach to collecting and managing fisheries information needs to be re-thought, revised, and reworked.  The quality and completeness of fishery data are often inadequate.  Data are often not accessible in an appropriate form or a timely manner.  Methods for data collection and management are frequently burdensome and inefficient.  These drawbacks result in the inability to answer some of the most basic questions regarding the state of the Nation's fisheries, such as: How many vessels and people participate in various fisheries?  Do our policy decisions improve the economic and biological sustainability of our fisheries - by how much?  How are different people (harvesters, consumers, coastal residents, non-consumptive users) affected by these stewardship decisions?  An ability to answer these kinds of questions is essential to sound resource stewardship.  Simply put, to manage fisheries at local, state, regional, or national levels requires a much better fisheries information system than the one in place.


To address these shortcomings, the 1996 amendments to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act required NMFS to develop recommendations for implementation of a standardized fishing vessel registration and information management system to improve the state of our fisheries statistics programs.  This Report to Congress provides the recommendations for implementation of this "System."