eCatch 2.0 - rebuilding sustainable fisheries on the California coast using GIS

eCatch 2.0 – rebuilding sustainable fisheries on the California coast using GIS

eCatch 2.0 - rebuilding sustainable fisheries on the California coast using GISIf you follow environmental news then you probably already read about eCatch, a new iPad app developed by The Nature Conservancy that gives fishermen real-time access to the latest information on where the fish are – the abundant ones they want to catch and the overfished ones they need to avoid.

The basic idea behind eCatch is that some fish are becoming endangered through overfishing, and the best way to mitigate this is to give fisherman as an industry, the tools to manage their fishery sustainably themselves.

Using eCatch, fisherman at sea, report areas where they caught overfished species and learn from other fisherman where the more abundant species are. By collaborating and sharing information in real-time, fisherman can prevent rapid declines in fish populations and rebuild robust fishing industries and communities along California’s Central Coast.

eCatch 1.0 is a web-based application that allows for:

  • Visualizing the locations of catches for a variety of fishing vessels
  • Developing reports that summarize the species and catch from each vessel, and as aggregates for a group of vessels
  • Monitoring the progress towards catch limits
  • Tracking the capture of depleted species

The results are pretty impressive so far so The Nature Conservancy has engaged Farallon Geographics to help them develop eCatch 2.0.

eCatch 2.0 will introduce significant enhancements to the UI and mapping technology to make accessing and interacting with fisheries data both more dynamic and more intuitive. It will also expand the application so it is useful to managers and administrators as well as fisherman.

Users will be able to query and visualize catch histories in order to predict trends as well as define and view reports and histories on species limits, location and amount of overfished species taken for a given time period for individual vessels and aggregated by associations.

Some specifics:

  • Fishermen will be able to see on a Google basemap of the central California coast, locations where overfished species have been caught from their vessel, as well as any other vessel.
  • Fishermen will be able to display any portion of their fishing history on the map by indicating the time span and species caught.
  • Managers and Administrators will be able to link to a form that allows for editing logbook data simply by clicking on a set point.
  • The application will alert users when an overfished species catch event happens as soon as the data are entered into the system

Farallon is working with the Nature Conservancy on a set of web services for geospatial data access and reporting using Microsoft .NET web framework along with PostGIS/PostgreSQL, ESRI SDE, ESRI ArcGIS Server, ExtJS, and OpenLayers.

eCatch 2.0 is expected to go public sometime this year.

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