Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
Providing reliable and consistent fisheries data
Reliable and consistent fisheries production data is essential for managing small-scale fisheries. Understanding the economic impacts of management efforts across communities is also important. Small-scale fisheries are generally comprised of household enterprises that catch, process, and trade in fish. Many data collection efforts focus on generating high-resolution data to inform community based fisheries managemen. But they often struggle to build up comprehensive data on the volume and value of fish and shellfish being landed at a community level over time. A solution to this problem is to support fish buyers in recording their transactions with the fishers who sell to them. Our approach treats the fishing industry as a business. The goal is to improve the data available for individual household businesses to make decisions.
We couple fisheries production data with fishing activity data to help local management groups monitor their fishing potential. It also measures the result of management actions over time. For organizations and governments, this also provides a streamlined way of assessing the production and value of fisheries across a region.
Barefoot Ocean supports partners to deploy an android app called Ourfish. This app is free for use by local fish buyers in coastal communities. For fish buyers, this data can help them manage their small businesses, while for fishers, it provides an income history to help manage household finances. Individual user data is analyzed and pushed directly back to the user on the app itself. This assists buyers in monitoring their purchase costs and income from sales. It also helps with other financial obligations such as debt relationships with fishers. Fishers, on the other hand, can receive transaction receipts and income statements over time to build up their own record of their productive livelihood.
By collating these data, shielding personally identifiable information and individual business information, these community-level data can inform management decisions.
To compliment the production data captured by Ourfish, we support enumerator-based data collection using a digital platform to collect high resolution fisheries data such as fish or invertebrate length and gender, fishing effort (hours spent fishing per trip), gear types used, number of fishers on a boat, and quality of catch. These data can be used to establish baseline conditions, measure broad scale temporal change, and conduct detailed fisheries assessments.