Challenges:
Queensland’s commercial fishers operate regional businesses across more than 7000 kilometres of coastline, providing employment and fresh seafood to their local communities and overseas. Effective monitoring of these commercial fisheries is vital to ensuring healthy fish stocks that will support thousands of Queensland jobs, but current approaches are costly, time consuming, and prone to inaccuracies.
Solution
Through the Advance Queensland Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, the agency, along with two innovative start-ups has developed cutting-edge systems which can track fishing activity and location, as well as use cameras, sensors and machine learning to automatically recognise the types and quantities of fish caught and discarded. Trial units were installed on net, line, crab, trawler and charter vessels and monitored for 10 months, for ease of installation, usability of mapping interface and reliability and following the success of the trial, the program has been rolled out to all commercial vessels. Vessel tracking on all commercial fishing boats is a commitment in the Sustainable Fisheries Strategy 2017-2027. Vessel tracking will be required on all commercial fishing boats by 2020 with a priority to install units on net, line and crab commercial fishing boats.
The importance of use of modern technologies like vessel tracking to ensure the sustainability of Queensland’s fisheries is explained in the following video: