Saving Seafood

Big sea, bigger data: How analytics are making peace between fishermen and turtles

February 5, 2019 — The ocean is complicated. Our tools to manage it are blunt.

We often approach the ever-changing ocean as if it were a stationary valley in a national park. We close entire coastlines and restrict fisheries to protect single species. We’re flummoxed by wide-ranging mobile marine life and unprepared for climate change.

But a new generation of data-driven tools balances the needs of fish and fishermen and adapts automatically as the environment changes.

With the government’s towering stockpiles of ocean data, scientists can use weather and ocean chemistry to predict where fishermen are likely to catch their intended targets, including swordfish or tuna, and avoid protected species, such as marine mammals, sharks or manta rays.

Google and Facebook analyze data to predict our behavior with unnerving precision. With dynamic ocean management, scientists use similar strategies to protect the areas where turtles, albatross or whales are most likely to congregate in a given day or hour.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

New oceanographic insight pinpoints marine ‘hotspots of risk’

June 27, 2018 — Increased computing power has given fisheries researchers new tools to identify “hotspots of risk,” where ocean fronts and eddies bring together masses of fish, fishermen and predators, raising the risk of entangling non-target fish and protected species such marine mammals, sea turtles and sharks.

Using a novel, high-resolution “Lagrangian Coherent Structures” mapping technique, scientists are able to model dynamic features in surface currents. The capacity for improved, near real-time mapping of and eddies may now help alert fishermen and fisheries managers to the increased risk so they can try to avoid those protected species and better target the species they are after, the scientists wrote in an article published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Understanding how pelagic fish and marine predators interact with the environment can help fishers and managers avoid bycatch of non-target and protected species, while maintaining the catch of commercial species,” said Kylie L. Scales of the University of the Sunshine Coast (USC) in Australia, and lead author of the new research. “Our findings give managers information at the broad scales they need, which could help inform development of dynamic ocean management.”

Lagrangian Coherent Structures are known from the field of fluid dynamics and represent areas of mixing, where different water masses meet and tend to concentrate marine life and in turn fishermen. The new approach uses high-resolution ocean modeling to help detect and predict the areas as they form and move through the ocean, and highlight the elevated risk they may present.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Smart Software Helps Fishermen Catch the Fish They Want, Not Endangered Species

June 6, 2018 — In the ocean, everything moves. Waves push around vast swaths of saltwater, tides ebb and flow, and over time tectonic rumblings transform the seafloor. With all that movement, marine life travels as well—making the oceans one of the most dynamic ecosystems on Earth. This constant shuffling can make it hard to predict where a particular marine species might be on any given day. But that is exactly what Elliott Hazen, a fisheries scientist from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Association (NOAA), is trying to do through new modeling software.

Hazen and a team of other fisheries scientists developed EcoCast in an effort to reduce the unintended bycatch of protected marine species while supporting sustainable fisheries; their results were published last week in Science Advances. EcoCast is already being used to allow fishermen exemptions to fish in certain protected areas in California, and NOAA is working on a smartphone app that will give fishermen this dynamic data in real-time.

The team focused on the California Drift Gillnet (DGN) fishery, which targets broadbill swordfish along the U.S. West Coast. The fishery, which has declined in recent years, only brought in 176 metric tons of swordfish in 2017—down from a historical high of 2,198 metric tons in 1985. DGN fishermen use mesh nets that float vertically in the water to catch the swordfish, but the nets often trap additional species—a phenomenon known as bycatch—including the critically endangered Pacific leatherback sea turtle, blue sharks, and California sea lions.

It’s not just an issue of protecting endangered species, explains Gary Burke, a fisherman in California and a member of the Commercial Fishermen of Santa Barbara. “Fishermen don’t want bycatch. It breaks our gear and it’s expensive. So, we like to avoid it.”

EcoCast takes an array of oceanographic variables into account to generate a fluid map that highlights areas where fishermen are likely to find high concentrations of their target species and not the protected species they don’t want to catch.

Read the full story at Smithsonian.com

New Tool Helps Fisheries Avoid Protected Species In Near Real Time

June 3, 2018 — New computer-generated daily maps will help fishermen locate the most productive fishing spots in near real time while warning them where they face the greatest risk of entangling sea turtles, marine mammals, and other protected species. Scientists developed the maps, the products of a system called EcoCast, to help reduce accidental catches of protected species in fishing nets.

Funded primarily by NASA with support from NOAA, California Sea Grant, and Stanford University, EcoCast was developed by NOAA Fisheries scientists and academic partners with input from fishermen and managers.

Using the swordfish fishery as an example, EcoCast incorporates data from tagged animals, remote sensing satellites, and fisheries observers to help predict concentrations of target species (broadbill swordfish) and three protected species (leatherback turtle, blue shark and California sea lion).

EcoCast will help fishermen, managers, scientists, and others understand in near real-time where fishing vessels have the highest probability of catching targeted species and where there is risk of catching protected species. In doing so, EcoCast aims to improve the economic and environmental sustainability of fisheries that sometimes inadvertently catch and kill sensitive species.

Read the full story at NOAA Fisheries

Getting conservationists and fishers on the same page

May 31, 2018 — Historically, fisheries and the conservation community have struggled to find common ground. The tension between one’s desire to turn a profit and the other’s to preserve endangered or protected marine species that can be killed as bycatch has made it difficult to find solutions that satisfy both. Now, a new online tool developed by researchers at San Diego State University in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other universities could win support from both groups. EcoCast, developed with funding from the NASA Applied Sciences Ecological Forecasting Program, provides computer-generated maps to help fishermen target productive fishing spots while alerting them to areas likely to harbor protected species.

“This is a really different way of approaching ,” said Rebecca Lewison, a lead scientist on the project from San Diego State University and senior author of the new paper. “EcoCast pioneers a way of evaluating both conservation objectives and economic profitability. Instead of trying to shut down U.S. fisheries, EcoCast is trying to help U.S. fishermen fish smarter, allowing them to meet their set quota of target catch and avoid unwanted bycatch.”

Current protection zones for  are static, meaning authorities declare a zone off-limits to fishermen for some duration of time. But weather and oceanic conditions are ever-shifting, with species constantly moving in and out of protected areas. When protection zones are out of sync with the animals they’re designed to protect, both fisheries and conservation lose.

Read the full story at PHYS