TERRY J. CODY, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, 702 Navigation Circle, Rockport, Texas 78382, USA

DAVID M. DONALDSON, Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission, P.O. Box 726, Ocean Springs, Mississippi 39566-0726, USA

The Southeast Area Monitoring and Assessment Program (SEAMAP) is a cooperative state/federal program for collecting, managing, and disseminating fishery-independent data in the southeastern United States. Fishery-independent data collected by SEAMAP scientists provide essential information on abundance and distribution of marine fish and invertebrates, and environmental changes that are used by fisheries managers, academic researchers, and the commercial and recreational fishing industries. SEAMAP consists of three regional components: SEAMAP-Gulf of Mexico; SEAMAP-South Atlantic; and SEAMAP-Caribbean. The purpose of this presentation is to give a brief description of the state, regional and federal fisheries agencies and organizations that participate in each component and provide a summary of the program achievements and data that are available in the SEAMAP Information System. The overall approach of SEAMAP emphasizes the collection of fishery-independent data to fill specific short and long-term management needs. Data are collected from research vessels following scientifically-designed long-term survey plans. The SEAMAP database provides information allowing managers and scientists to monitor and assess the condition of species or species groups under state, interstate, federal, and international management. SEAMAP data sets are particularly useful in fisheries stock assessments because of their quality and time series. Specific examples of fisheries for which SEAMAP data are now being used to support management decisions include red snapper and shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico; Spanish mackerel, rock shrimp, and weakfish in the South Atlantic; and red hind in the Caribbean. The SEAMAP Information System provides an integrated and decentralized data system allowing users easy access to 14 years of SEAMAP data. The on-line database currently contains 332 cruises with a total of 2.2 million records. Data may be obtained from the SEAMAP Data Manager by specific request, or from SEAMAP participants, published reports, or most recently, through the Internet. There is still great potential for increased use of ongoing SEAMAP data collection for fisheries management, especially as the SEAMAP resource survey databases continue to grow into longer time-series of fishery-independent data.