The development on the ecosystem-based approach to fisheries implies to improve integrated analysis of fisheries by considering the biological as well as the socio-economic dimensions of the exploitation and thus, an improvement in the knowledge of fleets structure, evolution and activity. Since 2000, Ifremer has been implemented a Fisheries Information System (FIS), a multidisciplinary monitoring network allowing an integrated and comprehensive view of fishery systems including biological, technical, environmental and economical components. The FIS covers all the French fisheries, including the so-often neglected small-scale fisheries. One of the originalities of the FIS lies in the fleet monitoring procedure: a comprehensive collection of annual activity calendars aiming at characterizing the inactivity or activity of the vessels each month of the year and, in the latter case, the métiers practised (use of a gear to target one or several species) and the main fishing areas. This survey covers all the French fishing fleets and provides minimum but exhaustive information on the vessels. It is particularly instructive for the small-scale fisheries, where catches and effort data are often incomplete. Furthermore, this exhaustive data allows stratifying the fleet in fleets (typologies) and thus provides the basis (i) for the implementation of sampling schemes to estimate catches, landings, discards or economic performance of the different fleets and (ii) for the development of a fleet-métier matrix giving the possibility of identifying at the time, the structure of the whole fleet in fleets, the métier polyvalence of the vessels and the allocation of fishing effort on the different exploited fishing resources.