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Contact usFisheries and Aquaculture Resources Management
While there are e-infrastructures in place for fisheries and aquaculture resources management, new technologies are bringing the promise of greater harmonisation across systems, data sets spanning more disciplines, and more powerful analysis tools. Despite large quantities of data, many host applications and the increasing adoption of common semantic standards; fragmented data and systems hamper the modelling approaches needed for the support of fisheries and aquaculture resources management.
A project organised by more than a dozen large regional fishery bodies, the Fishery Resources Management System was recently put in place, creating the first harmonised global view of the state of fishery resources. The system allows member bodies to upload assessment data that adhere to a common standard; a laudable step which given new technologies can conceivably be taken even further. Virtual research environments hold out the promise of importing and harmonising data at earlier, pre-assessment stages. They also make possible the introduction of new non-traditional data streams such as remote-monitoring, the application of analysis tools and output using powerful reporting systems. VREs can be instrumental in facilitating the move away from traditional assessment models and towards more complex socio-ecosystem models.
Although initiatives are on-going to provide tools for socio-ecosystem modelling approaches, they only partially solve the problem as they are typically designed for stand-alone use and do not provide mechanisms for distributed communities and virtual collaboration. The broader questions of gathering, harmonising, processing and maintaining distributed data are not addressed, leading to another fragmentary solution.
These problems of the fragmentation of data, tools, outputs and communities combined with the difficulty of integrating new non-traditional data streams are critical.
Policy makers are increasingly asking for assessments based on more holistic approaches that take traditional data and combine it with environmental and socio-economic data. Given the current situation, assessment scientists find it difficult to create these reports economically and within the tight time-frame needed in order for national and regional commitments to socio-ecosystem approaches to be realised.
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