ACAP Guidelines on Fisheries Electronic Monitoring Systems

As fisheries with seabird interactions increasingly use electronic monitoring (EM) systems to meet monitoring requirements, ACAP recognizes the need for guidelines for EM systems to meet objectives of monitoring seabird interactions. These can then serve to inform and strengthen the development of guidelines and minimum standards for full EM systems (e.g., under development by some of the tuna regional fisheries management organisations) by accounting for the partial, seabird-related requirements of EM systems. Fisheries monitoring programmes supply data required for fundamental scientific, compliance monitoring and ecological and social sustainability assessment applications. EM systems are increasingly being used to complement and replace conventional human onboard observer programmes and to initiate at-sea monitoring where none previously existed. There have been 100 fisheries EM pilot projects since the first in 1999. There are now 12 fully implemented programmes. EM has the capacity to fill a vast gap in monitoring the world’s 4.6 million fishing vessels. EM systems typically use onboard cameras, global positioning systems, sensors and data loggers to collect information on fishing, transshipment and supply vessel activities. EM systems can be implemented through either formal programmes of national or regional management authorities, or they may be voluntary programmes. EM systems can collect most but not all data fields of observer programmes. When properly designed, EM systems have several advantages over conventional human observer programmes, including overcoming main sources of statistical sampling bias, allowing at-sea monitoring of small-scale fishing and support vessels that present various challenges for placement of human observers, enabling multiple areas of vessels to be monitored simultaneously and near-continuously, and allowing questionable data to be audited and corrected. These voluntary guidelines define how fisheries EM systems can be designed to meet three common objectives of fisheries monitoring programmes of (1) scientific, (2) compliance, and (3) management performance assessment as they relate to seabird interactions. However, ACAP recognises that not all EM systems are employed to meet all three of these objectives, where a subset of the full suite of data fields identified in ACAP’s guidelines would need to be included for an EM system selecting a narrower subset of objectives