Medidas de Gestao das Pescarias Marinhas e Aquicultura 2019 The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2018 | Page 196

PART 4 OUTLOOK AND EMERGING ISSUES
emergency services from artisanal vessels, or
applications (“apps”) for checking wave height
before fishing. Satellites collect information on the
condition of the sea and provide important near-
real-time information to improve safety, such as
wave height, winds and currents. These services
are often free and are accessible to small-scale
fishers, for instance through mobile apps.
there is no centralized repositor y of transactions
and associated information, so the system is
difficult to corrupt or hack; yet the information is
still accessible and transparent to users. Since no
single entit y controls the blockchain, there is also
no single point of failure.
The distributed ledger aspect of the blockchain
technolog y improves transparency, traceabilit y
and trust among those involved in the
transactions. The technolog y – now being trialed
in fisheries and in the food safet y sector – thus
holds considerable potential to improve market
access, especially for small-scale fishers and fish
farmers. The difficult y of corrupting information
in the block chain strengthens the traceabilit y of
fish products along the value chain, which will
enable more fisheries, aquaculture farms and fish
processing facilities to meet import requirements
such as the countr y of origin and phytosanitar y
standards of many countries. Improved
traceabilit y will also make it possible to fulfil
growing buyer demand for legally and
responsibly sourced fish. In some fisheries and
aquaculture farms, it will assist in meeting
certification requirements.
On board vessels, cameras and other sensors can
improve the monitoring of the catch, including
(but not only) the deployment of gears and
processing equipment. Images and videos are
useful to identif y species. The use of image
recognition software to detect and classif y caught
species automatically, which is already being
tested or used in selected fisheries, could result
in disruptive improvement of on-board
obser vations and catch reporting and much better
understanding of stocks and fisheries.
With sensors placed on board vessels (such as
acoustic sounders) and in the open waters (for
example, on buoys or as autonomous drones), fish
are now easier to detect and study. The information
they provide, when combined with catch reports,
can radically change the number and quality of
environmental and stock assessments.
The transparency of information and securit y in
the blockchain distributed ledger also has the
potential to improve business-to-business trust
and consumer confidence. Consumers could have
access to a range of information along the whole
value chain, such as where and how the fish was
caught; temperatures and times of handling and
storage; transit and processing countries and the
time in each countr y; and processing undertaken.
This access to information will provide an
incentive for actors along the value chain to drive
for more sustainable, high-qualit y and safe fish.
Analysis of the ocean of data provided by sensors
involves a complex workflow which extends beyond
traditional fisheries data centres. Cloud-based
services are required to cope with much larger data
storage needs at the point of creation. The prime
examples of such “big data” are the huge datasets
from satellites that monitor the environment, but
video and data from mobile phones also require a
software solution that can easily be adapted to an
increasing volume of data or users. The big-data
approach will change the understanding of natural
and human processes, such as the growth and
distribution of species or the spatial planning of
fisheries and aquaculture. Through big data, new
opportunities arise for tracing how and where
vessels operate and for tracking products all the
way to shops and consumers.
Sensors
The size of the digital universe is expected at least
to double every two years, well beyond 2020,
largely because of the expanded use of sensors.
Sensors, which now number in the billions
(Gartner, 2017) – are found, for example, in
multimillion-dollar satellites in space, on board
vessels, deep in the ocean and in your
smartphone. They enable services that were
unimaginable a few years ago, such as near-real-
time tracking of high seas fishing, contact with
Automatic identification systems
The maritime automatic identification system
(AIS) is an automatic tracking system used for
collision avoidance on ships and by shore-side
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