Catch reporting is a part of
Monitoring control and surveillance Monitoring, control and surveillance (MCS), in the context of fisheries, is defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations as a broadening of traditional enforcing national rules over fishing, to the support of the broa ...
of
Commercial fishing
Commercial fishing is the activity of catching fish and other seafood for commercial profit, mostly from wild fisheries. It provides a large quantity of food to many countries around the world, but those who practice it as an industry must often ...
. Depending on national and local fisheries management practices, catch reports may reveal
illegal fishing
Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU) is an issue around the world. Fishing industry observers believe IUU occurs in most fisheries, and accounts for up to 30% of total catches in some important fisheries.
Illegal fishing takes pl ...
practices, or simply indicate that a given area is being overfished.
Manual Catch Reporting
The general industry practice is to write out a catch report on paper, and present it to a fisheries management official when they return to port. If information does not seem plausible to the official, the report may be verified by physical inspection of the catch. Alternatively, a suspicious vessel may need to carry an independent observer on future voyages.
Semi-automated Catch Reporting
Some
Vessel monitoring system
Vessel Monitoring Systems (VMS) is a general term to describe systems that are used in commercial fishing to allow environmental and fisheries regulatory organizations to track and monitor the activities of fishing vessels. They are a key part of ...
s have features that collect, from keyboard input, the data that constitutes a catch report for the entire voyage. More advanced systems periodically transmit the current catch as electronic mail, so fisheries management centers can determine if a controlled area needs to be closed to further fishing.
While there is no standardization as yet for catch reports, a starting point came from a 1981 Conference of Experts:
* Catch on entry to each controlled area
* Weekly catch
* Transshipment
* Port of landing
* Catch on exiting a controlled area
* Days at sea
* Daily time at sea
* Seasonal catch limits
* Per-trip catch limits
* Limits on catch within certain areas
* Individual (vessel) transferable quotas
* Minimum or maximum fish (or shellfish) sizes
This was extended, in 1993, to include:
["Community-based fishery management: towards the restoration of traditional practices in the South Pacific", ''Marine Policy'' 17(2): 108-117 1993] to include the measurement of:
* catch
*
species composition
Species richness is the number of different species represented in an community (ecology), ecological community, landscape or region. Species richness is simply a count of species, and it does not take into account the Abundance (ecology), abunda ...
* fishing effort
* Bycatch (i.e., species unintentionally caught, such as dolphins in tuna fishery)
* area of operations
A number of programs require tracking of days at sea (DAS) for a given vessel. They may require tracking the total cumulative catch of a given fishery.
Major Trends
Where the local fishery economy permits, perhaps with international funding, near-real-time catch reporting will become a basic feature of vessel management systems. Software at fisheries management centers will cross-correlate VMS position information, catch reports, and spot inspection reports.
See also
*
List of harvested aquatic animals by weight
This is a list of aquatic animals that are Commercial fishing, harvested commercially in the greatest amounts, listed in order of tonnage per year (2012) by the Food and Agriculture Organization. Species listed here have an annual tonnage in exces ...
References
{{fishery science topics, expanded=management
Fishing industry
Fisheries science