2020 Archipelagic and Island States Innovation Challenges for Joint Research in Blue Economy or Marine Plastic Debris Areas: Mobile technology as an incentive for sustainable fishing practices - Scope of Work 3: Final research report

Other Publication ResearchOnline@JCU
Hutchinson, Neil;Mamangkey, Gustaf;Douglas, Alistair
Abstract

This collaborative project was conducted from November 2020 – March 2022. While originally envisaged as a 12 month project, considering the challenges on the ground and the covid situation in North Sulawesi, the AIS Forum Secretariat, the Tropical Futures Institute, James Cook University Singapore and Sam Ratulangi University agreed to extend the joint research timeline. Research under the agreed extended timeline was completed in March 2022 and initial testing of this approach to incentivise fishers shows indicates that such an approach shows promise. Under the project, the industry partner, Eachmile Technologies, optimised the mFish application and associated systems to enable a wide range of potential scenarios related to application use, including the introduction of a number of functions and an Indonesian language interface to enable its utilisation in the region. A range of training material was produced in the form of videos, translated into Indonesian to enable rollout and training in application use. On the ground in Indonesia, UNSRAT carried out site visits and surveys to identify suitable fishing communities to engage in the project, and conducted workshops to train local fishing communities to Mark, Release and Recapture fish and to utilise a mobile phone application to collect and report data. In Kema in North Sulawesi, fishers utilising larger boats and handline fishing techniques to fish up to 1000 km away were contracted to determine whether the training materials would enable data collection. This proved successful and the program was then rolled out to artisanal fishers in Parentek in North Sulawesi who fish locally using beach seine nets. A number of fishers were trained at workshops as participants and by the end of the project had successfully tagged and released fish, enabling an exchange of fishcoins through the app as proposed. At the point of report writing, no tagged fish had yet been recaptured and the researchers plan to continue to engage with the fishing community to further identify improvements that can be made to protocols to enable this and other communities to work towards sustainably managing their local fisheries.

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81

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James Cook University Singapore

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Singapore

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