Where the fish species at a ramp are actually published

What these two agencies publish

Two agencies publish it. South Carolina's Department of Natural Resources publishes readable species names against each public water access site — "Largemouth Bass, Alabama Bass, Black Crappie" and so on. New Mexico's Department of Game and Fish publishes numbered species codes across six columns, together with the coded-value table that translates them, so "304" becomes a species name using the agency's own codebook rather than our guesswork.

A third state may appear in the count above without a third agency being involved: where a ramp sits on a state line — the Chattooga, for instance — the agency across the river is sometimes the one that inventoried it, and the ramp is placed in whichever state the Census boundary puts it in.

Why there is no national species map here

Massachusetts publishes a FISH_CODES column in exactly the same shape as New Mexico's and does not publish the codebook. Without it, "10,11,16,17" is not information, and a plausible guess at what those numbers mean would be indistinguishable from invention. So Massachusetts ramps show no species, and the field simply does not appear on their pages.

This is the trade this whole site is built on. A national "fish at every ramp" feature would be easy to generate and impossible to trust. Species appear on the pages of the two states whose agencies published them, and nowhere else.

• A species list records what the agency surveyed or stocks, not what is biting today.
• Stocking schedules change annually and the GIS layer usually does not.
• Where you want current information, the state fisheries agency publishes stocking reports separately from its access inventory. Our ramp pages name the agency.