Ali4333/fishing-regulations

Open Fishing Regulations

An open, machine-readable dataset of recreational fishing regulations — bag limits, size and slot limits, open/closed seasons, and licence requirements — covering 12 jurisdictions across 9 countries. It is published and maintained by FishRadar, the fishing-conditions app, and powers the interactive, location-aware rules at fishradar.ai/fishing/. Released under CC BY 4.0 for free reuse.

• 💻 GitHub source repo: https://github.com/linkanlabs-ctrl/open-fishing-regulations
• 🐟 Companion species dataset: Ali4333/fish-species-catalog
• 🌐 App & web: https://fishradar.ai/fishing/

Not legal advice. Regulations change frequently. Always confirm the current rules with the official issuing authority (linked in every record's source_url) before you fish.

Jurisdictions

🇺🇸 Florida, Texas, California, and U.S. federal waters · 🇹🇷 Türkiye · 🇬🇷 Greece · 🇪🇸 Spain · 🇬🇧 United Kingdom · 🇳🇴 Norway · 🇳🇿 New Zealand · 🇦🇺 Australia · 🇯🇵 Japan.

Each record cites the official issuing authority (e.g. NOAA Fisheries, Florida FWC, Türkiye BSGM, New Zealand MPI) and a direct source_url.

Files

File	Description
regulations.jsonl	One row per (jurisdiction × species) rule. Loaded by the dataset viewer.

The richer structured packs (full nested licence rules, disclaimers, and per-jurisdiction geography) live in the GitHub repo under data/<country>.json, validated by a JSON Schema.

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("Ali4333/fishing-regulations", split="train")
print(ds[0])
# Filter to Florida species with a slot limit
fl = ds.filter(lambda r: r["country"] == "US-FL" and r["slot_limit"])
print(fl["species"])

To read a richer structured pack (with licence rules and disclaimers) from GitHub:

import json, urllib.request
base = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/linkanlabs-ctrl/open-fishing-regulations/main/data"
pack = json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(f"{base}/us-fl.json"))
print(pack["licenseRules"])

Fields (regulations.jsonl)

Field	Description
country	ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, optionally with subregion (US-FL).
jurisdiction / level	Display name and federal/state/national.
authority	Official issuing agency.
species	Stable kebab-case species id (matches the companion species catalog).
aliases	Common-name aliases (multilingual).
bag_daily / bag_possession / bag_annual	Retention limits.
min_cm / max_cm / min_inches / max_inches	Size limits.
slot_limit	If true, the fish must fall between min and max.
season_open / season_close	Lists of MM-DD open/close dates.
closed_all_year	True when a species is closed year-round.
notes	Free-text caveats and per-region overrides.
source_url	Direct link to the official rule.
last_verified	ISO date the pack was last checked.

Provenance & methodology

Each pack is a summary of publicly published recreational fishing regulations from the official government authority for that jurisdiction, with a direct source_url per species. Sizes are given in metric and (where applicable) imperial units. Per-region overrides that the flat schema can't express are captured in notes.

Contributing

Corrections and new jurisdictions are welcome on GitHub: https://github.com/linkanlabs-ctrl/open-fishing-regulations/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

License & citation

CC BY 4.0. Please credit FishRadar — https://fishradar.ai.

@misc{fishradar_fishing_regulations_2026,
  title  = {Open Fishing Regulations},
  author = {FishRadar},
  year   = {2026},
  url     = {https://github.com/linkanlabs-ctrl/open-fishing-regulations},
  note    = {https://fishradar.ai}
}