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Fishing has always involved ingenuity and invention, from the Pacific Islanders’ ancient tailoring of bones and shells into fish hooks (long before metal arrived in their cultures) to modern uses of everything from rotational sensors to machine learning to digitally understand where, when and how fishing takes place. Innovation typically takes place “in-house”, i.e. led by the fishing industry itself, with an increasing movement of start-ups, NGOs and entrepreneurs – motivated primarily by tackling the environmental and social challenges of seafood production – now joining this challenge. We have created a new “Sustainable Fishing Challenges” group on WILDLABS to try foster more of this innovation and collaboratively make fishing fit for the future.
At a very basic level, the three essential elements of fishing are 1. The vessel, 2. The fishing equipment (or “gear”), and 3. The fish (obviously). While some commonplace technologies are unrecognisable from those of the past (i.e. sonar fish finders, digital catch logbooks), some of the crucial components of the job have altered little (i.e. net design). Newly proposed vessel, gear or fish catch monitoring technologies must be robust, efficient and durable, meaning innovation needs to be answering a genuine need and be subject to thorough, collaborative testing (and consensus-building) before new advances are adopted across whole fleets or countries.
In this group, we challenge users to contribute their insights/expertise/opportunities across each of these three areas.
Learn more about these challenge areas:
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Fauna & Flora International (FFI)
Fisheries and Biodiversity Techical Specialist - lead FFI's insititutional fisheries strategy
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Conservation Newbie, Technologist, Applications Developer, Hardware Tinkerer
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WILDLABS Coordinator based in Southern California
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Fauna & Flora International (FFI)
Working in marine conservation in Africa (with a quite strong focus on East Africa so far) with Fauna & Flora International.
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WILDLABS
I'm the Community Manager at WILDLABS
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Junior machine learning engineer with a background in data science and physics
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PhD student on movement and behaviour of sharks
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Allen Institute for AI
Communications for EarthRanger and Skylight
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Long time Electronics Engineer working mostly building and operating instruments for airborne atmospheric research.
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University of Aberdeen
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Passive acoustic monitoring of lemurs in Madagascar
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Worked as a mechanical engineer for a defence co, then software engineer, then for a research lab specialising in underwater robotics.
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Check out this round-up of three of the latest news stories from the conservation tech world. See more conservation tech news by subscribing to our bi-monthly digest.
10 March 2022
Our first WILDLABS Editorial Series is now available for download! Read the full Technical Difficulties collection and explore stories of challenges, failures, and lessons learned from the conservation tech community....
19 January 2022
The Centre for Statistics in Ecology, Environment and Conservation, a research group within the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Cape Town, is now hiring for a funded postdoc or PhD postion with...
01 November 2021
In her article for the Technical Failures Editorial Series, WILDLABS' Ellie Warren discusses how the loss of one tagged sea turtle represents the wider challenges faced by conservation efforts, and how the collaborative...
08 October 2021
Our friends at the Conservation Leadership Programme are proud to announce their 2021 CLP Team Award recipients! We'll be featuring interviews with some CLP winners about their projects, the technology they're using,...
17 May 2021
How can remotely monitoring fishing vessels allow us to prevent illegal and unsustainable fishing practices? Check out this blog post from Max Schofield, originally shared on OceanMind, to learn about how AIS (Automated...
02 February 2021
WILDLABS community members are invited to submit an Expression of Interest to Fisheries Innovation Scotland (FIS) to participate in two research projects involving conservation tech's role in the future of sustainable...
08 December 2020
As we launch our new Sustainable Fishing Challenges group in the WILDLABS community, we are excited to welcome Daniel Steadman, the group manager, to give us an overview of three major areas in which #tech4wildlife...
04 December 2020
Do you have innovative #tech4wildlife ideas that could save one of the most endangered species on earth from extinction? Apply now to join Vaquita Hack, a hackathon for students and early career conservationists! This...
10 November 2020
Funding
Do you use #tech4wildlife in your ocean conservation work and want to get creative for prize money? Smart Oceans 2020 wants to see your videos, photos, and infographics that highlight ocean challenges or solutions. The...
08 October 2020
Today, Sustainable Fishing Challenges group leader Daniel Steadman discusses how fishing gear itself could benefit from fresh technological innovations to prevent both environmental damage and damage to species and...
19 August 2020
As we launch our new Sustainable Fishing Challenges group in the WILDLABS community, we are excited to welcome Daniel Steadman, the group manager, to give us an overview of three major areas in which #tech4wildlife...
04 August 2020
Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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Hey Evelyn, I work on building self-powered buoys that collect various sensor data (sea surface and sub-surface) that can be sent back to mainland over cellular/satellite... |
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Sustainable Fishing Challenges | 1 month 1 week ago | |
I’m an editor at FoodUnfolded – an EU-funded platform focused on reconnecting people with their food and... |
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Sustainable Fishing Challenges | 1 year ago | |
Hi all, Just some things I've come across on Twitter or through Wildlabs that weren't in a thread yet, for everyone's reference! https://fiscot.org/the-role-of-... |
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Sustainable Fishing Challenges | 1 year 2 months ago | |
Hi all! I am not in the marine/aquatic space myself, but I stumbled across this resource and wanted to share with you. It's a list of projects, people & organizations... |
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Sustainable Fishing Challenges | 1 year 2 months ago | |
Hi Karima - Are you looking for volunteers in specific regions or fisheries? |
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Sustainable Fishing Challenges | 1 year 4 months ago | |
Happy new year all! A couple of great resources on the use of technology in the small-scale fisheries sector. Firstly a series of sessions from the Seafood and Fisheries... |
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Sustainable Fishing Challenges | 1 year 5 months ago | |
Hi Wildlabbers, Following our recent Tech Tutors episode on monitoring fishing (... |
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Sustainable Fishing Challenges | 1 year 6 months ago | |
Hi Wildlabbers, Welcome back to Tech Tutors for season 2! This season's first episode featured Oceanmind's Max Schofield, who tackled the question,... |
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Marine Conservation, Remote Sensing & GIS, Sustainable Fishing Challenges | 1 year 6 months ago | |
Dan, I'm tempted to add that description into our event reminder that's about to go out. Brilliant. |
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Sustainable Fishing Challenges | 1 year 6 months ago | |
The fantastic team of fishing innovators and industry leaders at Fisheries Innovation Scotland (FIS) are calling for expressions of interest in two projects: a... |
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Sustainable Fishing Challenges | 1 year 7 months ago | |
Hello, I'm the Science Comms Manager at the MSC. I want to let you all know about our Ocean Stewardship Fund which opened for applications on the 8 October 2020, and close... |
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Sustainable Fishing Challenges | 1 year 8 months ago | |
Hi Wildlabbers, There's another free webinar series coming up, starting this Thursday, 24 September! This one is part of SAFET's conference... |
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Sustainable Fishing Challenges | 1 year 9 months ago |
News: The Latest in Conservation Tech

10th March 2022 at 12:00am
Download Now: The Technical Difficulties Editorial Series

19th January 2022 at 12:00am
Opportunity: PhD or Postdoctoral Research Fellowships - Chinstrap penguin biologging

1st November 2021 at 12:00am
Technical Difficulties: Tracking Thunderbird

8th October 2021 at 12:00am
Innovators wanted: the UN Food Systems Summit
4th June 2021 at 01:00pm
Webinar: Implementing SMART in the Marine Environment

20th May 2021 at 12:00am
Announcing the 2021 CLP Team Award Winners

17th May 2021 at 12:00am
Recent articles/resources
14th April 2021 at 01:31pm
Repository of fish/fisheries tech projects!
9th April 2021 at 02:53pm
Sea turtle monitoring
11th February 2021 at 11:44am
18th March 2022 at 11:53pm
Hi Evelyn,
I learned of the torsooi database to collect sea turtle data. The database per se may not be that interesting as an asnwer to your question but I know they have developed software that recognizes individual sea turtles based on pictures of their heads. The pattern of the head segments allows this.
If you manage to make pictures remotely, by land-based cameras or drones or whatever, this may help monitoring the individuals.
In my humble and non-expert opinion, this software has the potential to do away with metal tags.
cheers
Frank
18th May 2022 at 06:03am
Hey Evelyn,
I work on building self-powered buoys that collect various sensor data (sea surface and sub-surface) that can be sent back to mainland over cellular/satellite comms. Are these nesting sites close to shore or are they relatively far out at sea?
Best,
Aadu
O-FISH (Officer's Fisheries Information Sharing Hub)
9th February 2021 at 01:42am
18th February 2021 at 12:01am
Hi Karima - Are you looking for volunteers in specific regions or fisheries?
Using AIS Data to Investigate the World’s Fishing Ports

2nd February 2021 at 12:00am
Small-scale fisheries and tech resources
5th January 2021 at 09:45am
FIS Call for Expressions of Interest (closed)

8th December 2020 at 12:00am
Challenge #3: Fish Catch Monitoring
4th December 2020 at 08:47pm
13th December 2021 at 06:19pm
Hi Evelyn
Not sure if you've come across this paper about green turtles in Turks and Caicos
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2020.00690/full