Electronic Monitoring

Project Summary >

USA Pacific Whiting Trawl Fishery

Purpose: Catch Monitoring

January 01, 2005 Oregon, USA

During the Oregon whiting fishery, mid-water trawl vessels provide a steady supply of fresh fish to shore-based processing plants. The fishery has been identified for more intensive at-sea monitoring owing to concerns about accurate estimation of catch and by-catch. The use of at-sea observers for this fishery is problematic as vessels make short fishing trips of less than a day, often with very little notice. EM was considered to be an appropriate candidate for this fishery, as imagery could be used to document area of fishing and that all fish caught were brought aboard without pre-sorting. This information could be supplemented with catch sampling at the plant to provide comprehensive monitoring of the fishery. The National Marine Fisheries Service, Northwest Fisheries Science Center contracted with Archipelago to examine the use of EM in this fishery application.

An EM system was installed aboard a mid-water trawl vessel, providing a continuous record of GPS, hydraulic pressure, and imagery of the fishing deck. The system was aboard for 16 days and monitored 13 days of fishing operations for a total of 16 fishing sets. Results from this study demonstrated that EM provided the same or better data quality as an at-sea observer for information objectives including time and location of hauling events, and ensuring that all catch was retained aboard. Given the wide-angle camera views the use of electronic monitoring for species identification was limited.

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