Open Data
US fish stocking records
Stocking records from New York and California, the two state wildlife agencies in our corpus whose terms let us hand their data on, matched to the waters they went into. Download it, use it for anything, credit the source.
32,635
Stocking records
1,360
Waters
2
Reporting agencies
2011-2026
Years covered
Released 23 September 2026. Licensed CC BY 4.0, which means you can copy it, change it and sell work built on it, as long as you credit the source.
Download
- Stocking events (CSV)One row per stocking record, joined to the water it went into. This is the full dataset.32,635 rows · 6.5 MB fish-stocking-events.csv
- Waters with rollups (CSV)One row per water, with its coordinates, its total stockings and fish, and the span of its record.1,360 rows · 190 KB fish-stocking-waters.csv
- Waters (GeoJSON)The same waters as points, ready to drop into QGIS, Mapbox, Leaflet or a notebook.1,360 rows · 619 KB fish-stocking-waters.geojson
- Data package descriptor (JSON)Frictionless descriptor: schema, sources, licence, and links to every file.3 KB datapackage.json
What we added to the public data
Both agencies publish their own records, in their own schema, on their own portal, and you can take either one straight from the source. What this file adds is modest and we would rather say so: one set of column names across both, a date precision flag on every row, and every New York water resolved against the public domain USGS place name file, so each New York record carries the coordinates its agency feed does not publish.
Read this before you use it
Two states, and the missing ones are missing on purpose.
Montana, Utah and Washington publish stocking records we show on our stocking pages, but none of them grants permission to redistribute: Montana and Utah attach only a warranty disclaimer, Utah limits copying of its stocking report to personal or informational use, and Washington publishes no licence. Several other states publish under a written commercial use ban. An earlier release of this file, dated 16 September 2026, included Montana, Utah and Washington. We removed them because we could not point to a grant, and we would rather ship two clean feeds than five contested ones. For those states, go to the agency.
Every date is month precision.
New York and California both report the month rather than the day, so treat stocked_on as the month the fish went in. The date_precision column says so on every row, and will tell you if that ever changes.
The two feeds cover very different spans.
New York runs from 2011 and posts each year after it closes, so its latest records trail the calendar by months. California is a thin, recent slice with no fish counts and no sizes. Group by reporting_agency_state before you group by year, or the start of the California feed reads as a change in stocking.
The water's state and the reporting agency's state are different columns.
New York stocks Lake Champlain, which our gazetteer places in Vermont. Group by reporting_agency_state to ask what an agency did, and by water_state to ask what happened in a place.
This is not a national census.
Two agencies is a small share of the country. Use it to study New York and California, not to say anything about stocking in the United States as a whole.
Where it comes from
Every record is a state agency's own published record, taken from the feed named below. We normalised the schema, resolved each waterbody against the public domain USGS Geographic Names Information System, and changed nothing else. We include an agency only when its published terms allow redistribution in writing.
| Agency | Records | Waters | Latest record | Terms |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Dates are month precision. Every New York row carries the first of the month, not the day the fish went in. The agency posts a year once it closes, so the latest records trail the calendar by months. | 30,427 | 975 | 2025-12-01 | OPEN-NY Terms of Use. Reuse for any lawful purpose. No attribution, share-alike, or pre-approval required. |
| California Department of Fish and Wildlife A thin slice: recent months only, with no fish counts and no sizes. Dates are month precision. Announced-but-unmade plants are excluded. | 2,208 | 385 | 2026-09-20 | CC BY 4.0. Attribution required. |
California's records are published under CC BY 4.0 and their attribution requirement carries through to this file. If you use the California rows, credit the California Department of Fish and Wildlife alongside us.
What is in each row
30,407 records carry a fish count and 30,427 carry an average size in inches, all of them from New York. Every record carries a species, a date, a county and the coordinates of the water. The hatchery, strain and size category columns are empty in this release, because neither agency publishes them. Full field definitions, formats and source links live in datapackage.json, which is a standard Frictionless descriptor, so most data tooling can read the release without any of this page.
How to cite it
Angling Hubs (2026). US fish stocking records [Data set]. Compiled from New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and California Department of Fish and Wildlife records. https://anglinghubs.com/data/fish-stocking
A link back to this page satisfies the licence. If you build something with it we would like to see it, and we will link to you from here.
