Abstract

By all accounts, fishers are on the frontlines of ocean change and should be considered an important ally in ocean monitoring, management, and conservation. Yet, a history of misinformation, broken trust, and unsustainable practices – following decades of subsidies to maximize catch and profit – has dissolved relationships and pitted fishers against other stakeholders, scientists, and decision makers. Today, when the future of fish is uncertain, there is both an urgent call for conservation and a fervent push to grow the ocean economy. For the first time in history, fishers are faced with the possibil-ity of being excluded from their historic fishing grounds. Getting marine spatial planning decisions right is arguably one of the most important challenges of this decade. Through literature reviews, conversations, and analysis of fisheries data, we aimed to understand the contemporary situation of fishers in the role of monitoring and decision making, with the aim of building a system that would enable and empower fishers to be at the forefront of ocean monitoring, management, and conservation. The Smart Fishery Tracker, in the eOceans platform, is a suite of digital tools and real-time analyses that equip fishers and fishing groups with timely, standardized, reproducible, expert-developed insights of their catch and bycatch data, along with other ocean dimensions that interest them. This positions fishers to effectively and efficiently improve their efforts, eliminate the barriers that lead to unreported and unregulated fisheries, and enables fishers to play a critical role in the management and conservation of our ocean.

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