Marine recreational anglers spend billions of dollars each year supporting our coastal communities and support over 450,000 jobs. This week is National Fishing and Boating week and we are celebrating saltwater recreational fishing across the country.

NOAA Fisheries has released its Virtual Ecosystem Scenario Viewer, a web-based application that illustrates the responses of virtual marine ecosystems to a range of living marine resource management scenarios. The tool helps audiences see the application of models in managing marine resources and explore tradeoffs among scenarios in future management decisions.

In recognition of National Fishing and Boating Week, Russ Dunn, our National Policy Advisor for Recreational Fisheries, discusses the Agency’s evolution on how we engage and work with recreational anglers while managing for sustainable recreational fisheries.

NOAA Fisheries has released quick-reference fact sheets about recreational fishing across the country. From the rocky shores of New England to the warm waters of the Western Pacific, saltwater recreational fishing is integral to the social, cultural, and economic life of our nation’s coastal communities.

Every day, the United States and our partners across the world work together to crack down on  illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing and seafood fraud. These practices hurt law-abiding fishermen, damage the economy, and threaten our food security.

Anglers fish for highly migratory species from New England to the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea. HMS fishing is important to the cultural, social, and economic life of Atlantic coastal communities.

States along the Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific coasts have received an additional $3 million for recreational fisheries data collection. The funding is part of a NOAA Fisheries plan to provide the state support described in the Modernizing Recreational Fisheries Management Act of 2018.

In response to COVID-19, the U.S. delegation to the International Pacific Halibut Commission recently worked on behalf of the Alaska charter fishing sector to liberalize key charter fishing halibut measures. With a precipitous decline in visitors to Alaska this spring, many Alaskan charter captains found themselves without customers, income, or future bookings, and with a need for help in sparking demand for charter halibut trips.

Sea surface temperatures have been generally cooler than 2019 but still warmer than the long-term average. And the eastern Bering Sea may be heading toward warmer summer temperatures again.

Recreational fishing for swordfish off southern California has surged during the past year. Fishermen have started borrowing a strategy from East Coast anglers and the commercial fishing world: go deep during the daytime.

Holders of federal for-hire fishing permits (charter and headboats) in the South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico will soon enter the digital age. They will begin providing fishing trip level logbook information electronically. Data will be collected from approximately 3,000 charter and headboat vessels, most of which have never reported catch information.

This novel use of drones is a promising way to remotely monitor these hard-to-see fish. Researchers have used an unmanned aerial system (or drone) to gather data on schooling juvenile Atlantic bluefin tuna in the Gulf of Maine.

Oysters play critical roles in the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem—by filtering water as they feed and by providing habitat and forage for other Bay species. But only about 1 percent of the historic oyster population remains in Maryland due to overharvesting, habitat loss, and disease. So partners including NOAA are working to restore oyster reefs.