An android based application to collect catch and effort data from the coastal fisheries of Sri Lanka to minimize the gap of data availability

Coastal fisheries provide livelihoods for millions of people in many countries however are often poorly documented or the data of the same are poorly reported. This issue is critical in many small-scale inshore fisheries operated in areas contain high marine biodiversity, Therefore, Novel and cost-effective approaches to obtain fisheries data are required to monitor these activities and help inform sustainable fishery and marine ecosystem management. Sri Lanka made an effort to achieve the above requirement via am android application, while asking the officers who collect costal data to submit catch and effort data via a simple smartphone interface. The data floor of the software were designed in accordance with the manual data collection process practiced by the fisheries officer in the filed level. The application can be accessed by all filed officers incorporated in the duties of each Fisheries Inspection (FI) Division to submit data from more than 950 landing sites are there in the coastal belt. The application was only tested as a pilot project in order to identify the gaps in the system. Number of adjustments were made according to the findings via the pilot project. However this attempt was heavily affected by the prevailing COVID 19 pandemic. Currently the database structure and the mobile app can be considered as stable and it was expected to undergo another pilot phase after conducting a comprehensive training to the officers.