Sustainable Management of Fishery Resources by creating more transparency of fishery activities at sea using space-based technologies
The overall objective of the TransparentSea project is to contribute to the sustainable management of fishery resources world-wide by supporting fishery certification issuers, such as the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) or the International Sustainable Seafood Foundation (ISSF), in enforcing the value and credibility of certified seafood products by creating more transparency of fishery activities at sea using space-based technologies. Together with the MSC and ISSF as “anchor customers” the project aims to establish a service that is also required by other actors in the sea food supply chain, such as sea food processors and retailers. The project aims to use AIS and other space-based M2M satellite communication systems combined with GNSS for seamless tracking the certified fishing fleet around the world. At the same time Earth observation data will be exploited in combination with fishing vessel track-data to validate the conformity of fisheries activities against sustainability measures, benchmarks and standards endorsed for example by MSC or ISSF. A communication platform will be developed and maintained (internet and smartphone apps) where consumers have access to detailed fishing vessel tracking data, information about the compliance with sustainable fishing practices as well as other essential information about the participating certified fishery and the sea food product purchased. Finally, a service chain will be established for an operational service and the service will also be offered to other customers.
In an ongoing extension called seeFish, the features and functionalities of TransparentSea are being upgraded. SeeFish will provide a more generic and configurable interface which can be easily integrated in the systems currently used by the fish processors/seafood resellers, making use of the VMS tracking data for the fisheries in addition to AIS and increasing the rate of AIS data supply.