Turning data to value for fisheries
Return to Innovative Research section
Return to 2020 Annual Report index
Mote Marine Laboratory research programs represented on this page: Fisheries Ecology & Enhancement Program • Fisheries Habitat Ecology & Acoustics Program
Stories on this page: A data wellspring for fisheries management • The oceans have a lot to say, and we're listening
A DATA WELLSPRING FOR FISHERIES MANAGEMENT
- Center for Fisheries Electronic Monitoring at Mote
More than seven years ago, Mote Marine Laboratory and partners began working with commercial snapper-grouper fishers to test electronic monitoring (EM) systems on their vessels in the Gulf of Mexico with the goal of effectively/efficiently documenting fish catch and discard rates to aid sustainable fishing and fisheries management. EM—required in some U.S. fisheries, but still being investigated for the Gulf—involves deploying video cameras and sensors on fishing vessels and allowing scientists to analyze the results confidentially in the lab.
By the end of this fiscal year, the Center for Fisheries Electronic Monitoring at Mote (CFEMM) had clearly demonstrated that EM can operate successfully in the Gulf. Over the years, CFEMM staff have amassed more than 100,000 annotated records from more than 282 fishing trips (nearly 2,500 days at sea) describing 133 species or species groups of caught and discarded marine life, thanks to an ever-growing team of volunteer snapper-grouper vessels carrying an ever-improving suite of EM technology.
This year in particular, Mote’s CFEMM has grown by leaps and bounds, securing nearly $1 million of new competitive grants for EM projects spanning 12-18 months, awarded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program (NOAA BREP), NOAA’s Cooperative Research Program (NOAA CRP), National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Electronic Monitoring and Reporting Grant Program (NFWF EMR), and the Net Gains Alliance (NGA).
With these grants, Mote is further refining and expanding its EM methods—and above all, Mote scientists are working to transform their wellspring of EM data into actionable insights for fishers and fisheries managers to help ensure that Gulf snapper-grouper resources are sustainable.
Fisheries stock assessments require extensive data, but many are data deficient due to monitoring constraints. Only about 2% of the Gulf’s snapper-grouper vessels are monitored by NOAA’s on-board fisheries observers. Data from captains’ voluntary discard logbooks and independent studies are also extremely important but limited in consistency and coverage.
Here are the solutions Mote is advancing:
- Helping EM data reach decision makers:
This year, Mote began the process of building a new, online, password-protected EM data portal where government, industry and science partners will be able to access EM results to inform their sustainability decisions while protecting fisher privacy. As an independent, nonprofit institution, Mote is mapping out the best pathways to feed data into government agency decisions, to the fishing industry and to individual fishers. That includes linking new EM data to existing records with different strengths and limitations, such as NOAA Fisheries Observer reports, trip tickets that FWC requires from commercial fishers selling their catch, and dockside biological sampling efforts. Today, Mote scientists are already sharing their EM data with fisheries management through participation in the gag grouper, greater amberjack and scamp/yellowmouth grouper working groups in the SouthEast Data, Assessment, and Review (SEDAR)—the process for fish stock assessments in NOAA Fisheries’ Southeast Region. Mote scientists are also providing CFEMM data and expertise as members of working groups including the Atlantic Coastal Cooperative Statistical Program (ACCSP), which aims to draft a standard, or set of standards, for fishery-dependent data derived from EM programs along the Atlantic coast, and the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) Working Group on Technology Integration for Fishery-Dependent Data (WGTIFD), which has a diverse membership including technology service providers, academic and governmental marine institutions, and nonprofit environmental organizations, across a wide range of fisheries in Europe, the U.S., Canada, South Africa, and Chile. This group is examining electronic technologies and applications that are used to support fisheries-dependent data collection, both on shore and at sea, including electronic reporting, electronic monitoring, positional data systems, and observer data collection, and examining how they can be integrated for the benefit of industry, management, and other stakeholders.
- Turning raw data into real value:
Mote scientists are improving their EM data collection and analyses to help answer big questions of interest to fishers and fishery managers. One example: How is bycatch (unwanted species that must be thrown back) related to environmental conditions? A fishing area might yield lots of unwanted species like sharks in some seasons or environmental conditions—making it a poor target for cost-effective, sustainable fishing—while it might yield the desired snapper or grouper under other conditions. Mote scientists, with partner Waterinterface LLC, are adding a growing variety of environmental data to their EM analyses to identify such relationships for fishers and managers.
- Growing the Gulf EM team:
By mid-2020, Mote had deployed EM gear from Saltwater, Inc., on a growing team of at least 20 volunteer vessels from the Gulf’s commercial snapper-grouper fishery. Those vessels are based in Florida (primarily Madeira Beach) and Texas (Galveston) and Mote is in the process of expanding further. Mote scientists are also improving their processes to manage, store and rapidly analyze and report on these huge quantities of incoming data using non-proprietary review software from Saltwater, Inc., and applying various statistical and modelling platforms with partner WaterInterface LLC.Conducting the first real-world tests of underwater cameras with EM:
Standard EM video cameras are mounted above water and can’t document bycatch that stays underwater—for example, large sharks released by cutting the line alongside the vessel. To help solve this problem, Mote scientists and community-science volunteers have conducted successful preliminary tests of a prototype underwater camera system (called UCAM), determining how to position and operate it to capture valuable footage of shark bycatch as well as predatory animals feeding on catch.
This year, Mote’s UCAM advanced from preliminary tests on private and charter vessels to deployment on a commercial snapper-grouper vessel. It was deployed using an innovative system designed and built by partners at SeaSucker, LLC, with valuable input from fishers using it hands-on.
Mote’s CFEMM is the first to integrate underwater cameras with fisheries electronic monitoring. This ongoing research effort will investigate how much the UCAM improves EM data on bycatch, discards, and depredation of targeted catch and fishing gear (damage from predatory animals such as sharks and marine mammals) during real commercial fishing trips.
Additional valuable data is being obtained through the first use of a “discard chute” in the Gulf. The chute allows discarded species (including bycatch or target species of the wrong size) to be documented with photos and measured as they’re released. The chute—along with added cameras on booms, viewing the vessel stern to help document if discarded species were alive or preyed upon just after release—are integrated into Mote’s EM system through a partnership with NOAA Fisheries’ Galveston Laboratory, Alaska Fisheries Science Center, and Saltwater Inc.
- The future is in sight:
With the large quantities of monitoring video CFEMM is producing, Mote scientists are setting their sights on how to process it more efficiently in the future. They are laying initial groundwork for future efforts to use artificial intelligence, or machine learning, systems that can be trained to recognize the presence, absence and species groups of fish in EM videos—work that currently requires a trained set of eyes.
- The EM-mazing team:
This year Mote scientists looked back on how far CFEMM has come thanks to its community-science (citizen-science) volunteers and college interns. From September 2016 to December 2020, CFEMM’s 45 skilled volunteers and nine college interns provided 16,299 volunteer hours with an estimated value of more than $391,297. This dedicated, trained team has provided valuable assistance with reviewing EM videos, field testing EM tools, working on software-based methods to measure fish, UCAM development, providing input on software and template improvements, and providing multiple kinds of technical assistance related to data management, participating vessel needs, and general problem solving.
- Helping EM data reach decision makers:
THE OCEANS HAVE A LOT TO SAY, AND WE’RE LISTENING
- Goliath grouper projects:
- Goliath grouper—a species that was severely depleted by overfishing and is slowly rebounding under fishing moratoriums in the U.S. and Caribbean—is the subject of two major, ongoing projects by Mote scientists and partners. In each project, Mote and partners use acoustic recordings of goliath grouper to understand their vocal dynamics in response to human activity, and their abundance and behavior relative to sound production. Scientists at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute and Mote are studying the detail of Goliath grouper sound production and hearing thresholds to understand how Goliath grouper may respond to unmanned underwater vehicles. This project, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), involves listening for sounds from these large fish—which tend to be “curious” and inspect novel objects in their habitat—as part of a new smart-sensing system to remotely alert authorities of incoming manned and unmanned underwater vehicles.
- Mote scientists are in the last year of a Goliath grouper acoustic study funded by NOAA’s Marine Fisheries Program (NOAA MARFIN). This five-year project investigates the relationship between Goliath grouper sound production and sonar surveys, which document the presence and spatial distribution of fish at spawning aggregation sites. These sites, where dozens of these imperiled grouper gather to reproduce, are important areas for research, conservation and management. By comparing sonar surveys with passive recordings of sounds, scientists aim to infer more detailed information—such as abundance and biomass of grouper—from future sound recordings alone. Compared with active sonar surveys, passive sound recordings can be collected more easily over longer time periods using hydrophones left in the environment; it’s critical to maximize what can be learned from each recording. To date, Mote scientists have conducted more than 200 sonar surveys. These, combined with passive acoustic recordings, demonstrate patterns in grouper behavior and abundance that follow the lunar cycle, with reproduction near the new moon.
- Mote scientists are building a library of marine sounds—with the long-term goal of teaching computers to recognize and document underwater soundscapes more efficiently than people can, a form of machine learning. This research effort—funded by the Southeast Coastal Ocean Observing Regional Association (SECOORA)—focuses on harnessing the rich information contained in underwater sounds, which can indicate the presence and behavior of animals, habitat quality and habitat use patterns, human activity and environmental conditions. To start, Mote scientists are compiling audio clips of black grouper, an important commercial fishery species, recorded in the Atlantic Ocean and Florida Keys using acoustic data loggers. Black grouper produce one main call—some people say it sounds like a space ship—with minor variations, along with at least one other, simpler, booming sound. Mote scientists aim to collect around 2,500 examples of black grouper sounds as the basis of their library, which they will share with collaborating students at New College of Florida, who will work on machine-learning algorithms for processing the sounds.
Through this project, Mote scientists aim to scale up and speed up the processing of huge sets of sound data to produce products useful for answering questions about the oceans and human impacts on them. The project also emphasizes collecting additional acoustic data at known or suspected spawning sites for important commercial fish species. Additionally, project scientists hope to install acoustic sensors on autonomous platforms used to study harmful algal blooms—an opportunity to document sounds in areas with and without these blooms.
- Goliath grouper—a species that was severely depleted by overfishing and is slowly rebounding under fishing moratoriums in the U.S. and Caribbean—is the subject of two major, ongoing projects by Mote scientists and partners. In each project, Mote and partners use acoustic recordings of goliath grouper to understand their vocal dynamics in response to human activity, and their abundance and behavior relative to sound production. Scientists at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute and Mote are studying the detail of Goliath grouper sound production and hearing thresholds to understand how Goliath grouper may respond to unmanned underwater vehicles. This project, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), involves listening for sounds from these large fish—which tend to be “curious” and inspect novel objects in their habitat—as part of a new smart-sensing system to remotely alert authorities of incoming manned and unmanned underwater vehicles.