The Advisory Committee on Fisheries Research (ACFR) Working Party on Status and Trends of Fisheries met in Rome to consider how fishery status and trends reporting could be improved in terms of quality, scope and timeliness and better coordinated to allow a more systematic synthesis of information from national to regional and global levels. Owing to the importance of status and trends reports, and the scrutiny they receive, the Working Party recommended that the global system of status and trends reporting be advanced by: increasing completeness by including some fisheries and fishery resources that are currently under-represented; expanding the scope of current reports that are primarily on catch and fishery resource information to include other dimensions of fisheries; and enhancing quality assurance and credibility.