PORTLAND, Maine (AP) – Federal and regional fishery managers are paying too little attention to the billions of pounds of fish that fishermen unintentionally kill and throw back into the ocean in New England and nationwide, a coalition of conservation organizations said.

The Marine Fish Conservation Network released a report Thursday that says the government has taken few steps to reduce the amount of wasted fish, or bycatch, and fails to take bycatch into account when setting annual targets.

“We need to be able to account for all the fish and other ocean wildlife that are killed,” said Roger Fleming, senior attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation, a member of the network.

The network, a national coalition made up of 170 conservation, fishing and science groups, also criticized funding cutbacks to hire observers who ride on fishing boats to monitor and track bycatch.

A fishery analyst with the New England Fishery Management Council management agency said the report was flawed and inaccurate.

The report relies on inflated numbers of discarded fish, said Tom Nies. Bycatch data and projections are built into population assessments and fishing rules whenever possible, he said.

“The bottom line is we use bycatch estimates in our groundfish estimates when we have data available,” he said.

The National Marine Fisheries Service is now compiling data for a national report on bycatch, said Susan Buchanan, a spokeswoman for the agency.

“We’re constantly working on bycatch reduction,” Buchanan said.

But the Marine Fish Conservation Network argued that the lack of good data helps perpetuate a cycle of overfishing that keeps the fish and fishing communities from recovering. Bycatch needs to be reduced as well as monitored, the network said.

The report said that groundfish and scallop fisheries in New England accounted for 337 million pounds of discarded fish in 2002.