Abstract

In 2013, DIGEPESCA stablished a collaboration agreement with the Centre of Marine Studies (CEM) with the purpose of facilitating the modernization of the registration systems meant for the control and inspection of the fishing sector of the country. Since then, CEM has developed an online system to take on the General Fisherman Registry (RGP according to its Spanish acronym), which has progressively grown since its piloting in 2014. From 2015 on, regular improvements on the RGP have enabled to suit national license demands, reflected in an increase of 1,169 registries in 2015 to 3,510 for 2016. Nowadays, the app “Ourfish”, which links with the RGP via a QR code printed in the licenses it issues, created to monitor fisheries by means of a mobile device, is being rolled out to serve as an electronic logbook aimed for merchants of fishery products acquired from small-scale fishermen. At present, there are twenty users, among fishmongers and fish collection centers, registering their daily transactions for several months now. Nevertheless, the development of these applications has been considerably challenging, as it was not taken into account the magnitude and reality of the country at the time of its design. This has resulted in setbacks in both its use as in the analysis of the resulting data, to which CEM is providing a solution through the renovation of its underlying structures and platforms. These improvements will allow in the short-term and along the coastal and insular Atlantic zone of the country the deployment of the Ourfish app in at least 50 small-scale seafood-marketing centers. Such endeavor will generate the inflow of thousands of data on fishery production to the system, which will be possible to visualize for fisherman as for national public authorities via an online dashboard

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