SET01 - CATCHMACHINE

Station de Sète
Avenue Jean Monnet
CS 30171 - 34200 Sète

Strengthening knowledge on recreational fishing is a major and current challenge in the Mediterranean Sea. As part of the Ocean Hackathon, IFREMER, the Gulf of Lion Marine Park, the French Federation of Sea Fishermen and the SATHOAN professional organization have joined forces for the first time around a collaborative project. 

About twenty clubs, members of the FFPM, organize 2 to 3 fishing contests per year. That is to say more than 100 days of recreational and sport fishing, which could constitute for the scientific community a major source of data to better understand the populations present in the area of the fishing contests, in particular their size, their spatial distribution and the period of distribution.

Particularly for buefin tuna, the practice of no-kill has developed, allowing the pursuit of a sport with a lesser impact, provided that the good practices are known. But the information on the individuals caught and released is neither known nor valued.

The FFPM is aware of this and wishes to mobilize.

OP Sathoan has obtained a double eco-certification of its bluefin tuna line fishery, as a result of its effort to improve sustainability of fishing practices (selectivity, scaring, good practices of release). But the maintenance of its label is conditioned by an action to improve the knowledge about the recreational fishing, which the OP does not feel legitimate to do.
IFREMER and PNMGL are present today to make the link between the two worlds throught this project.

A smartphone application: simple, didactic, attractive, which is intended to be used for all fishing competitions in France or in other countries, and for all species. An application where a sport fisherman :
- Signs up for a contest, whose area is geolocated on the application
- Learns before the competition the good gestures to release fish (integrating FFPM videos and Guide of the responsible fisherman)
- Declares through the referees his catches, integrating if possible the photo of the catch (integration of the visual recognition software of the catches FFPM)

Interactive and didactic application design
GIS and spatial modelling
Marine ecology
AI and machine learning