IFISH
Irish Fisheries Information Sharing Network Development
WE NEED YOU
COVID-19 has delayed our plans to travel out to the ports and chat to industry about the IFISH project. But we are still looking to learn from industry experience when it comes to how different components of the catch are recalled from memory. If you have five minutes to spare to help with this research please follow the link below to a short survey. Thanks!
Aims of the project
The IFISH project aims to investigate how new technologies and mobile phone apps could be used to share real-time information to help skippers avoid unwanted catches and reduce discards.
What Are We Doing?
We are building on static mapping approaches that have previously been developed to identify where hotspots of certain species are likely to occur. By incorporating near real-time data into these maps we can provide much more detailed and timely data about the location of unwanted catches, whether that be non-target species, small fish or quota limited species, to assist in their avoidance. The use of any developed tools or technology will be completely voluntary, with skippers only taking part if they feel it would be useful, and all information shared would be private and only available to those skippers using the final IFISH app. Details on the progress we have made so far can be found below.
DiscardLess Hot Spot Map Explorer
As part of the Horizon2020 DiscardLess project we produced a tool to assist stakeholders in identifying areas where there was a high chance of encountering quota managed species in the Celtic Sea, to aid in better targeting of catches while avoiding choke species. This is a static map based on historic catch patterns and the IFISH project hopes to build on this work to provide information about where unwanted catches are in near real time.