# Krummholz Fishing datasets - PRELIMINARY

Release date: 2026-10-22. Derived from the previously acquired release-candidate snapshot.

NOAA Marine Recreational Information Program 2024 recreational fishing observations across all six available waves. Catch, trip activity and measured fish size support exploratory tabular ML. These are recreational survey data, not commercial fishing or vessel-control training data.

## Contents and audit

Table | Input observations | Excluded | Retained observations | Unique published feature rows
--- | ---: | ---: | ---: | ---:
catch | 168,561 | 0 | 168,561 | 121,863
trips | 96,328 | 0 | 96,328 | 60,634
size | 170,085 | 42,892 | 127,193 | 112,607

A CSV row is a unique normalized feature vector. `record_count` records how many retained observations it represents. Duplicate vectors are stored once; legitimate repeated measurements are not silently discarded. Do not sum counts from different tables as if they were independent people, fish or trees.

All parts have their own header. Concatenate the data rows of all tree parts to reconstruct the deduplicated tree table. Keep conditions, trips, catch and size tables separate. `schema.json` defines exported columns; `audit.json` contains exact removal lists, missingness, row reconciliation and source/output checksums.

## Cleaning and privacy

Interview/trip/site/PSU/stratum and variance identifiers, exact times, residence/ZIP/county/municipality, personal demographics, phone/contact-related fields, and administrative variables are omitted. State, two-month wave, fishing mode and broad fishing area remain. Original survey weights and available imputation/alternate flags remain as features. Size records without a species or any size measurement are excluded.

Whitespace and equivalent numeric spellings are standardized without rounding. Blank and documented missing-token spellings become empty CSV cells. No synthetic values or fabricated labels are introduced. Source files remain unchanged in private staging; original row-level identifiers and rejected records are not bundled.

No retained feature columns were entirely empty. Source-documented unknown/refused codes BOAT_HRS=99.9 and GEAR=98/99 become empty cells; their actual recoding counts appear in audit.json. Source measurement and estimation flags are documented in source-variable-definitions.json.

## PRELIMINARY limitations

Removed design and join keys mean these tables cannot reproduce NOAA survey estimates, their uncertainty, or trip-level joins. record_count preserves repeated fish/feature observations; it is not a survey weight. Related observations can remain correlated and no independent train/test split is supplied. Use wave-based holdouts and domain review. The acquired October 2026 source snapshot is fixed here; agency revisions or calibration changes may supersede it.

The release removes direct identifiers and fine location fields, but is not a formal anonymity guarantee, domain-expert quality certification, or validated production model dataset. Numeric checks do not establish that every measurement or code is scientifically correct. Choose task-specific targets and predictors carefully: calculated volumes, biomass and carbon can leak information when used together.

## Attribution and source terms

NOAA public-use government data. NOAA Fisheries policy states that information created by the U.S. government is not subject to U.S. copyright. Third-party content can have separate rights. Attribution: Courtesy: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA Fisheries, Marine Recreational Information Program.
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/about-us/website-policies-and-disclaimers

This release contains modified numerical public-use data and a species codebook. Krummholz does not claim copyright over upstream government data, assign an MIT license to them, or imply NOAA endorsement.


Verified official sources (2026-10-22):

- NOAA MRIP recreational fishing downloads: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/recreational-fishing-data/recreational-fishing-data-downloads
- NOAA MRIP Data User Handbook: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/s3/2025-03/MRIP-Data-User-Handbook_March_2025_update.pdf.pdf
- NOAA Fisheries copyright policy: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/about-us/website-policies-and-disclaimers
- MRIP survey variable definitions CAL2026: https://apps-st.fisheries.noaa.gov/st1/recreational/MRIP_Survey_Data/MRIP_Survey_Variables_CAL2026.xls