Abstract

Innovation in fisheries, especially efforts to use digital technologies to solve issues and promote sustainable fishing practices in the Caribbean, has arguably been slower than comparative efforts in other sectors. It is well understood that to effectively manage fisheries and maintain the sustainability of fish stocks in this evolving landscape, robust fisheries data is essential. Conventional fisheries data collection systems are often time- and resource-intensive involving manual data recording using logbooks and vessel data reports, manual data entry, analysis and interpretation. Issues of quality control and assurance can also arise due to lack of standardization in data collection, transcription errors and misreporting (Lowell et al. 2015). In response to the growing need to address many of the shortcomings of current approaches and improve fishing efficiency, developments and technologies have been gradually emerging within the fisheries sector, offering benefits to both fisheries managers and fisherfolk (Tassetti et al. 2022, Hoenner et al. 2022). It is a common observation that fisheries management authorities typically have greater resources and institutional capacity to integrate digital technologies into their operations, while the uptake among fisherfolk can be slower. Lack of resources and insufficient digital literacy of Caribbean fisherfolk still remain major barriers to the successful use of digital technologies.

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