Application of ICT and automatic resource estimation for coastal fishery using real-time fishery information

An automatic method to compute resources estimation for coastal fishery was proposed by applying Information and Communication Technology (ICT) using real-time fishery information. The real-time fishery information used in the study is the location data of fishing vessels and the record of a catch in each operation. The network platform developed by the authors is introduced to the fishing vessel which connected to GPS for collecting location data every ten seconds and to send them to the database (DB) server via email. A record of the catch of a fishing operation including the vessel´s ID, date, starting and ending times of the operation is transmitted to the DB by a special iOS App, so called the digital diary, on fisherman´s iPad. The information collected by the digital diary is utilized to estimate the distribution of density of the catch, then the density is used to estimate the initial amount of the fish automatically by the algorithm based on the swept area method. In order to determine the initial density in the fishing ground, the authors divided the fishing area into the fixed grids with the size of 100m times 100m. The present algorithm has been applied to 16 vessels of sea cucumber dredge-net fishing in Rumoi City, on the west coast of Hokkaido, Japan. The system collected information of approximately 2,400 fishing operations in the summer season in 2012. The accuracy of the estimated initial amount of the sea cucumber by the present algorithm is compared to the result computed by manually using GIS. The results show that the difference was less than one percent in both methods and it can be concluded that this automatic algorithm worked well for resources estimation in coastal fishery.