Using electronic monitoring imagery to characterise protected species interactions with commercial fisheries: A primer and review

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Summary

Monitoring commercial fisheries provides essential information to enable effective fisheries management. Traditionally, human observers have provided the majority of fisheries monitoring services, with other methods used including position monitoring (e.g. using Vessel Monitoring Systems), at-sea boarding and aerial surveillance.

While monitoring using human observers can work well in some cases, challenges such as occupational safety, space constraints on smaller vessels, representativeness of data collected, and cost, have catalysed the exploration of other methods.

In this context, electronic monitoring (EM) using on-vessel cameras has developed through extensive trial, pilot and operational programmes in the last 15 years.

Amongst other objectives, EM has been used to monitor interactions between threatened, endangered and protected species (TEPS) and commercial fisheries.

This report provides a review of:

• The types of interactions between commercial fishing operations and threatened, endangered and protected species detected by EM,
• Training given to EM analysts to detect and describe those interactions in imagery, and,
• Recommended next steps to support effective review of EM imagery of protected species interactions, that is collected from New Zealand fisheries.

Publication information

Pierre, J. 2018. Using electronic monitoring imagery to characterise protected species interactions with commercial fisheries: A primer and review. Final Report prepared by JPEC for the Conservation Services Programme, Department of Conservation, Wellington. 42 p.