Open Data
US fish stocking records
Stocking records from five state wildlife agencies, matched to the waters they went into. Download the whole thing, use it for anything, credit the source.
114,409
Stocking records
2,878
Waters
5
Reporting agencies
2000-2026
Years covered
Released 11 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.114,409 rows · 25.0 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.2,878 rows · 391 KB fish-stocking-waters.csv
- Waters (GeoJSON)The same waters as points, ready to drop into QGIS, Mapbox, Leaflet or a notebook.2,878 rows · 1.3 MB fish-stocking-waters.geojson
- Data package descriptor (JSON)Frictionless descriptor: schema, sources, licence, and links to every file.3 KB datapackage.json
What this adds to what is already out there
Each of these five agencies publishes its own records, in its own schema, on its own portal. Nobody publishes them together. The work in this file is the normalising: one set of column names, one date format with a precision flag, and every waterbody resolved against the public domain USGS place name file so a lake stocked by two agencies is one row rather than two.
Read this before you use it
Only 69,259 of 114,409 records carry a fish size.
Washington publishes no length at all, and it is the largest feed in the set. Any size analysis is really an analysis of the other four states.
A state entering or leaving the record moves the pooled average on its own.
New York joins in 2011 already stocking about an inch above the others, and Utah's published feed stops at the end of 2024 taking half of all size records with it. Both edges look like fish getting bigger and neither one is. Group by reporting agency before you group by year.
Date precision differs by state, and a column tells you which.
New York reports the month, so every New York row is dated the first. Everyone else reports the day. Filter on date_precision rather than assuming a date is exact.
The water's state and the reporting agency's state are different columns.
Utah stocks Flaming Gorge Reservoir, which sits in Wyoming. 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.
Some water names are agency record keys, so both versions ship.
Utah's feed stores names in a 22 character field, all caps and abbreviated, so "WILLOW PARK PND" is a real stored value. water_name is our expansion and water_name_as_reported is the agency's own string, kept so you can join back to the source feed.
Five states is not fifty, and the missing ones are missing on purpose.
Several states with excellent stocking data publish it under a written commercial use ban. We left those out rather than argue about it. This file is what five agencies allow anyone to reuse, not a national census.
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.
| Agency | Records | Waters | Latest record | Terms |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife The largest feed, and it publishes no fish length, so none of these records carry a size. | 44,886 | 916 | 2026-07-09 | data.wa.gov open-data portal. No restrictive licence. |
| Utah Division of Wildlife Resources The published record stops at the end of 2024. Later Utah stockings exist but are HTML only, so they are not in this file. | 38,274 | 793 | 2024-12-28 | Warranty disclaimer only, no use restriction. |
| 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. | 20,078 | 539 | 2025-11-01 | Open NY. No attribution, share-alike, or pre-approval required. |
| Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks The deepest feed in the set: waterbody, coordinates, species, number, size, exact date, hatchery and strain. | 10,907 | 552 | 2026-06-23 | Warranty disclaimer only, no use restriction. |
| California Department of Fish and Wildlife A thin slice: recent months only, with no fish counts and no sizes. Announced-but-unmade plants are excluded. | 264 | 78 | 2026-08-02 | CC BY. Attribution required. |
California's records are published under CC BY 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
113,726 records carry a fish count, 69,259 carry an average size in inches, and 55,666 name the hatchery the fish came from. Every record carries a species, a date, and the coordinates of the water. 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 US state wildlife agency 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.
