Poster by: Gil Sylvia, Oregon State University
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Fisheries are evolving toward greater collaboration and self-governance in response to mandates for sustainability, catch shares, cost recovery and environmentally responsible fishing operations. These drivers, together with rapidly improving technologies, are increasing the demand for fast, reliable, and innovative systems for collecting, storing, communicating, and sharing fisheries data. Efficient, comprehensive, and cost effective eFIS systems can generate significant value to the industry, science, and management communities, but only if incentives are aligned, costs and benefits shared, and transparent and especially, rational standards developed. Achieving these goals is particularly challenging in the U.S. since the U.S. currently does not have consistent national standards for fishery data. Data monitoring systems are developed and implemented at the regional level and are as diverse as the fisheries they track. New technology for eFIS offers the opportunity to increase efficiency and accuracy while reducing costs, but these potential gains are unrealized due to inconsistent implementation across the U.S. This makes the path to eFIS far from clear, and potentially only implementable on a fishery-by-fishery basis.
This poster summarizes the vision, need, and strategies for creating a comprehensive and practical set of core eFIS standards and guidelines. It provides a definition of standards, the classes of required standards, provide examples, and propose a process for their development. The poster provides an argument that supporting a consistent set of standards for Electronic Fishery Information Solutions (eFIS) — that provides a framework for system development while allowing adjustments for local requirements — could spur entrepreneurial development and widespread interest and adoption of eFIS by the industry. eFIS products could be used by federal or state fishery managers in developing or updating monitoring and reporting requirements and ensure that systems are interoperable across firms, industries, and government.
