Acronym: CEDER Period: January 2006 till 2007 Status: Completed
European Commission Joint Research Center (JRC), more, co-ordinator
Uncertainties in human activities contribute significantly to the overall uncertainty in the assessment of stocks and in the estimated impact of management advice. However the current widespread deployment of modern technologies such as the Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) and electronic logbooks to record and communicate fishing activities have the potential not only to improve the accuracy of such data but also increase its spatial precision and to reduce the time it takes to arrive at the desktops of fisheries stakeholders shipowners, producer organizations, authorities, scientists - thus opening up a new set of possibilities for a more responsive fisheries management.
It is the primary objective of this project to harness these technologies to provide more accurate and more timely information on catches, effort, landings, discards and quota and TAC uptake and to assess the benefits of this information for fisheries management. The project will proceed in three phases.
In the first "analysis" phase all available data from the fishery from traditional sources such as observers and landing notes as well as from new sources such as VMS will be collected and analysed in order to determine relationships between the different measurements VMS and declared effort or landings and log-book entries for instance and to convert these measurements into the information required by the stakeholders.
The second "testing" phase will involve carrying a series of pilot studies under real conditions to show the feasibility of obtaining real-time information on fisheries, to identify bottlenecks and to measure the performance of the technology used in terms of accuracy of information, timeliness and cost.
The third "implementation" phase involves determining how the system could be moved from pilot scale to full-scale EU implementation and identifying the benefits for stakeholders in doing so.
