A tech-savvy fisherman has created an advanced sonar software system that lets fishing vessel operators "see" their catch before their nets hit the water.
Fisheries and the environment both suffer from inefficient fishing techniques. Fisheries make less money, and the environment is needlessly depleted of fish and other marine life that fisheries can't use.
With the help of a National Science Foundation grant, Patrick Simpson started a company -- Scientific Fishery Systems, or SciFish -- to develop technologies to help fisheries simultaneously protect their own investments and the environment.
FishTrek 98 (formerly known as Fisherman's Associate) combines fishery, oceanographic, and navigational data to "enable fishers to get a better return while minimizing their impact on the ecosystem," Simpson said. The newest version of the program will be released in August.
"Not only will Patrick's efforts have a profound effect on the state of Alaska, but [they will] also globally affect how people can sustain a finite resource: the world's fish stocks," said Sara Nerlove, of the National Science Foundation.
Simpson came up with the idea for FishTrek while working in the defense industry in San Diego. Working with sonar technology, he learned that using a wide range of frequencies gives a better response. As a former fisherman himself, he considered how this could translate into the fishing industry, which up until now used single frequencies in its sonar. He figured you could also use broadband, multiple-frequency sonar to more accurately determine the constitution of a fish population.
"You can identify the fish species and even the length of the fish. Once you understand what the frequency looks like, you don't even have to catch the fish to find these things out," Simpson said.
The FishTrek software contains an electronic log book and mapping package, which allows the fisher to enter sea conditions, visibility, moon phase, air temperature, surface temperature, and any other relevant information, to look for correlations between the conditions and good fish populations. The maps can be displayed, stored, and printed on a printer or plotter.
And the software is not only for commercial fishers. Sport fishers and charter boat captains can also use it to determine which areas are the best during a specific time of the year by creating or retrieving maps on a laptop or PC.
"The basic premise is that fishermen are hunter-gatherers, so the more selective they can be the better off the environment will be. The question in today's fisheries is: How can we catch what we want without a lot of bycatch?" Simpson said. Bycatch includes any marine life that fisheries are prohibited by law to catch.
The commercial fishing industry in the north Pacific throws away nearly one billion pounds of bycatch fish and marine life each year in the process of harvesting groundfish species such as pollock, cod, and yellowfin sole, according to the Alaska Marine Conservation Council.
In response to this problem, the Fisheries Management Council of each region enforces strict regulations.
"Fisheries have bycatch caps. You can catch a certain amount and after that you're shut down. If fisheries can lower the bycatch, they can keep their fishery open longer," said Steve Ganey of the Alaska Marine Conservation Council.
Fisheries Management Councils get their information from the National Fishery Service. To predict the total allowable catch, the service performs its own catches to survey catch composition in a particular area.
To kill the fish to determine how many there are seems counterproductive, Simpson said. So SciFish created a customized version of the software for the National Fishery Service.
The service can use FishTrek to reduce the number of surveys it does and get more accurate information. "They're doing quite a bit of extrapolation, and they can do a better job with the better data," Simpson said.
Although the main benefit of FishTrek is less bycatch, "it doesn�t automatically mean less bycatch will be caught," Ganey said. With a longer season, it's possible fisheries could average just as much.
SciFish is also contributing to NASA's efforts towards commercialization of its Mission To Planet Earth -- a program created to learn about the earth's system -- by developing data products for fisheries derived from NASA remote sensors using FishTrek.
