FishGuider will increase the income and reduce the costs related to catch of pelagic fish species such as herring, cod and capelin. This will be achieved by development and validation of new theory for fish migration and a novel guidance system for fishing companies.
The project will combine new marine ecological models adapted to data from fishing vessels and satellites. The system will guide the fishermen to locations where they can expect to find the right fish species within their given quotas. Thereby, the time spent either searching for fish or fishing in suboptimal locations will be reduced. This will lead to a more sustainable harvesting of the ocean resources. Thus, the innovation will make a fundament for better cooperation between the fishing industry and the research and management communities in countries that harvest in the same ocean area.
The project is financed by the fishing industry (IPN) and by the MAROFF program in the research council of Norway.
Project partners:
- North Atlantic Institute for Sustainable Fishing (NAIS)
- Nybonia Hav AS
- Dahl Fiskeri AS
- Lurøyveiding AS
- Brødrene Bakken AS
- Havdrøn AS
- SINTEF Ocean
- Norges Teknisk Naturvitenskapelige Universitet (NTNU)
- Universitetet i Bergen (UiB)
NAIS became a partner of SFI Harvest, and presented FishGuider at one of the SFI Harvest meetings, September 17th 2021.
FishGuider was presented at the Midsundkonferansen 2020 and at Midsundkonferansen 2021.
It was planned a hosting seminar under Nor-Fishing 2020, but the exhibition was canselled.
We were invited to present the project to ICES Annual Science Conference 2020. We submitted the presentation. Due to the Covid-19 also this meeting was exposed.
The project was presented at ICES Annual Science Conference 2021.
NAIS and NCMC are establishing a company, which intends to commercialize results from FishGuider.
Fishing companies lack guidance systems based on a systematic approach for synthetisation of available data from models and measurements in order to find fish in the ocean. Hence, this project will develop methodologies and tools to provide fishermen with recurrently updated forecasts of geographical distribution of fish stocks in order to make improved decisions about catching the right fish species in the right ocean areas. Thus, the innovation will help the fishermen to achieve reduced time and costs per catch as well as increased income per catch. Moreover, this innovation will be important for a sustainable fishing policy as it will add to the decision basis for improved management of the assigned quotas for the fishing companies.
The innovation from this project will be achieved by integration of new marine ecological models adapted to data from fishing vessels and satellites into a decision support system for the fishing vessels. The most critical R&D challenges to be faced are:
- Modelling of marine ecosystems, including migration of pelagic fish.
- Utilizing satellite data from AIS sources, surface temperature and chlorophyll, and catch data from electronic report systems for adaptation of the model.
- Aggregation and synthetisation of the data into a consistent, trustworthy and useful advice to the skippers of where to go to make the next catches.
The innovation will make a fundament for better cooperation between the fishing industry and the research and management communities in countries that harvest in the same ocean area.
