Monitoring modern-day fisheries is extremely challenging

The Aifish LLC was awarded a $300,000 project grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under the Small Business Innovation Research Program to develop advanced data analysis tools for electronic monitoring in fisheries management. NOAA's SBIR program supports small businesses in stimulating technological innovation to meet federal research needs. Aifish will provide data analytics software to help fisheries managers efficiently process large volumes of video and sensor data collected by electronic monitoring systems onboard commercial fishing vessels. A single fishing trip can generate over 1,000 hours of video, which currently requires extensive manual review to quantify catch amounts, discards, and protected species interactions. The tools developed under this September 2022 award aim to significantly reduce the time required to analyze such data, with the goal of enabling electronic monitoring to cover a greater percentage of the world's fisheries than the current 1.5% estimated capacity.

Every day, millions of vessels harvest the oceans, and many remain unregulated, putting target and non-target fish populations at risk of overexploitation and collapse. To combat this, fisheries managers are increasingly turning to electronic monitoring (EM) technologies integrated systems of cameras and sensors to record onboard activity and gather the large amounts of data required to make sound regulatory decisions. Fisheries managers require advanced data analysis tools to handle the surplus of data produced by these systems. A single commercial fishing trip can produce over 1000 hours of video, which must be manually reviewed on-land to quantify all fishing activities, including fish that are caught and discarded, and encounters with protected species. Due to the substantial time required for processing, without significant technological advancements these technologies are forecast to cover only 1.5% of the worlds fish