Fish Tissue Data Collected by EPA Partners
National Listing of Fish Advisories
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's partners, including state, local and Tribal environmental health officials, collect fish tissue data that can be used to develop fish and shellfish advisories. For more information on specific data collected by these partners, refer to their respective websites.
From the 1970s through 2010, the EPA requested fish tissue data from the states, territories and Tribes annually, and added the data to the National Listing of Fish Advisories (NLFA) database. From these data, the EPA developed a mapping tool that allowed state, local and Tribal fish advisory program managers and other technical users to search for now historical fish tissue data. This mapping tool provided a central repository of the historic fish tissue data but was decommissioned in 2026 because it had not been updated since 2011.
- Technical factsheet that summarized the content of the NLFA database
- Questions and answers about the NLFA database
- Data download (ArcGIS files): Fish Tissue Data Collected by States for State Fish Advisories Between 1967 and 2010
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Programs under the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS)
NOAA’s National Status and Trends (NS&T) is comprised of three nationwide programs: Benthic Surveillance, Mussel Watch and Bioeffects. These programs are designed to describe the current status of, and detect changes in, the environmental quality of our nation's estuarine and coastal waters through environmental monitoring, assessment and related research.
NOAA’s National Mussel Watch Program monitors the status and spatial and temporal trends of chemical contaminants and biological stressors in the nation’s coastal waters. The Mussel Watch Program is the longest running continuous contaminant-monitoring program of its kind in the United States. The program utilizes a sentinel-based approach to monitoring by collecting and analyzing sediment and bivalves (oysters and mussels) as surrogates for water pollution and bioaccumulation from a network of sites across the U.S. and territories.