How Accurate Is Public Fish Stocking Data? Precision, Coverage, and "Not Reported"

Public fish stocking data is only as precise as what each state agency chooses to publish. Washington reports an exact day for every stocking; New York reports only the month; and roughly 23% of Washington's records and 12% of New York's still have no map coordinates at all. Here's exactly what each state gives you — and what we do when it doesn't.

Key takeaways

• Date precision differs by state: Montana, Utah, and Washington report an exact day for nearly every record; New York reports only month and year; California mostly reports week-level dates.
• Geocoding coverage also varies: Montana and Utah are 100% geocoded, California is 100% geocoded, New York is 88.4% geocoded, and Washington is 76.8% geocoded.
• When a fact isn't in the source report — a fish count, an exact date, a coordinate — we show it as "not reported," never a guess or an estimate dressed up as data.
• Every stocking record traces back to a named state agency report, so any number here can be checked against the original source.
• Non-geocoded records are excluded from map views and "near me" searches — they still exist in the underlying data, they just can't be plotted.

Date Precision Varies by State

Not every state agency publishes stocking dates the same way. Based on the records in our database:

• Montana — day-level precision for all 111,723 records.
• Utah — day-level precision for 108,729 of 108,738 records (99.99%); the remainder report only a year.
• Washington — day-level precision for all 108,994 records.
• New York — month-level precision for all 40,893 records; the state's own reports don't break stocking down to a specific day.
• California — week-level precision for 4,406 of 4,429 records (99.5%); the remainder report only a year.

We never upgrade a vaguer report into a fake exact date. A New York stocking shows as a month, not a day picked at random within that month — the precision on the page always matches what the state actually published.

Not Every Water Is Geocoded

Mapping a stocking record requires a latitude and longitude, and not every state report includes one for every water. Coverage by state:

• California — 100% of records (4,429 of 4,429) have coordinates.
• Montana — 100% of records (111,723 of 111,723) have coordinates.
• Utah — 100% of records (108,738 of 108,738) have coordinates.
• New York — 88.4% of records (36,156 of 40,893) have coordinates.
• Washington — 76.8% of records (83,757 of 108,994) have coordinates.

Records without coordinates aren't discarded — they still show up on a water's own page — but they're excluded from map views and "stocking near me" searches, since there's no honest way to plot a location that isn't in the source data.

What "Not Reported" Actually Means

Some fields are simply absent from what a state agency publishes, and we treat that as a fact worth showing rather than a gap to paper over. Two concrete examples: California's own fish-count field for city-pond catfish stocking is blank in every record we have, so those pages say "not reported" instead of guessing a number that was never published.

(We wrote more about that specific gap in our guide to California's catfish stocking program.) The same rule applies everywhere: a blank field on the source report becomes a blank field here, labeled honestly.

Why We Show Gaps Instead of Filling Them In

It would be easy to make every page look more complete — round a vague date into a specific one, estimate a missing fish count, or interpolate a coordinate from a nearby water. We don't, for the same reason a state agency's own report is worth trusting in the first place: the moment a number stops tracing back to a real source, it stops being data and becomes a guess. Every figure on this site is either pulled directly from a cited state report or explicitly marked as unavailable.

• Implausible dates get rejected, not silently kept: a source date that decodes to before 1900 or into the future is dropped in favor of the record's reported year, rather than displayed as a false exact date.
• Every page cites its source agency and report date, so any figure can be traced back to where it came from.

If you want to see this in practice, our guide on how to read a fish stocking report walks through an individual record field by field.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does one state show an exact date and another only a month?

Because that's the level of detail each state agency actually publishes. New York's stocking reports are organized by month rather than exact day, so that's the most precise, honest figure we can show — inventing a specific day would misrepresent the source.

Why can't I find a stocking record on the map?

Some records — most commonly in Washington (about 23% of records) and New York (about 12%) — don't include coordinates in the state's own report. Those stockings still exist in our data and appear on the water's own page, but they're left off maps and "near me" searches rather than plotted at a guessed location.

Does "not reported" mean the data is wrong?

No — it means the fact simply isn't in the source report. Rather than estimate a fish count, size, or date that was never published, we label the field as not reported so it's clear what is and isn't confirmed.

Which states have the most complete data?

Montana and Utah currently have both 100% geocoding and day-level date precision across their full record sets, making them the most granular of the five states in our database.