The Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries Knowledge Base service is being developed within the BLUEBRIDGE project (https://i-marine.d4science.org/web/bluebridgeproject) and it is addressed to provide the basis for computing regional or global indicators on the status of fish stocks. Specifically, it will contribute to systematize a yearly production of FAO’s Global State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (SOFIA) resources. It is expected that by 2017, the Global Record of stocks and related status reports will contain 2000 stocks, enabling a regular computation of more reliable indicators on stock status. The Global Record will also contain 2000 fishery records, related to effort and catches. The potential to expand relies on co-funded new activities. The target number of requests for information from the global record is 100000. The Global Record is going to become available for practitioners (thus including MSP practitioners) as a Virtual Research Environment, brought by iMarine Gateway (https://i-marine.d4science.org). Access to this Virtual Environment will be regulated by authorization request.
Questions this practice may help answer
- Which is the status of fish stocks in the European Seas?
- How are fishery efforts distributed in European Seas?
Implementation Context
BlueBRIDGE (Building Research environments for fostering Innovation, Decision making, Governance and Education to support Blue growth) is an on-running H2020 project whose overall objective is to support capacity building in interdisciplinary research communities actively involved in increasing scientific knowledge about marine resource overexploitation, degraded marine environment and ecosystems, with the aim of providing a more solid ground for informed advice to competent authorities and to enlarge the spectrum of growth opportunities as addressed by the Blue Growth Societal Challenge. BlueBRIDGE aims to develop innovative services in the following areas:
Blue Assessment - services for stock assessment and for the generation of unique identifiers for global stocks;
Blue Economy - services supporting the analysis of socio-economic performance in aquaculture;
Blue Environment - spatial planning services to identify aquaculture and fisheries infrastructures from satellite imagery;
Blue Skills - on-line training services and capacity building on existing training modules for fisheries scientists and other practitioners.
A series of applications are being developed in the context of BlueBRIDGE, including the Global Record of Stocks and Fishery Knowledge Base (GRSF KB).
Aspects / Objectives
This application aims at providing an on-line knowledge base on the Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries for a Blue Growth audience of ecologists, resource managers, market parties, and the general public with the long term objective to give an evidence based information on the status of marine stocks and fisheries and to promote responsible consumption.
The main challenge is to provide an effective communication mechanism on stocks and fisheries that builds on existing information resources. Specific objectives of the GRSF KB are:
- More accessible data through an effective single web-interface for currently separated knowledge bases
- Clear and easy to understand for users (e.g. using traffic lights)
- Manageable at authorization levels, e.g. data managers and users will have different data views
- Transparent; with traceable and well described information provenance and ownership metadata
- Communicative, by having a KB integrated with query and display features, including a map-interface
- Dynamic, by delivering tools and services for data owners to collect and merge data with the GRSF KB.
Method
The Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries Knowledge base is a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) brought by iMarine Gateway. This gateway is an access point to a number of Virtual Research Environments deployed and operated in the context of the iMarine project, to support the Ecosystem Approach to fisheries management and conservation of marine living resources. It empowers practitioners and policy makers from multiple scientific fields such as fisheries, biodiversity and ocean observation by ensuring that otherwise dispersed and heterogeneous data is available to all stakeholder communities through a shared virtual environment that brings together multidisciplinary data sources, supports cross-cutting scientific analysis, and assists communication.
Each Virtual Research Environment is a "system" per-se, aiming at providing their users with a web-based working environment offering the entire spectrum of applications and facilities (including services, data and computational facilities) needed to accomplish a given task. It offer specialized functionalities for the management, processing, and visualization of scientific data and textual content.
The Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries Knowledge Base is being set up considering the following datasets:
- Fisheries and Resources Monitoring System (FIRMS) fact sheets
- http://firms.fao.org/firms/en
- RAM Legacy database: http://ramlegacy.org
- FishSource: http://www.fishsource.com
Main Outputs / Results
The Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries Knowledge Base will provide a Blue Growth audience of ecologists, resource managers, market parties, and the general public with an evidence based information on the status of marine stocks and fisheries and promote responsible consumption. Specifically, the following functionalities are being developed:
- Data integration of current information sources using a set of minimal data requirements
- Data harmonization to dissemination standards with a special focus on provenance
- Data publication = Data output tools
- Data provenance management
- Data merging and mapping tools
- Data repositories (LOD)
- Metadata management and Master Data Management.
Expected outputs are:
- Structured Semantic Knowledge Base
- Management Indicators
- Visual presentations; maps and graphs
- Reports and Fact-sheets
- Knowledge base content (Global record of Stocks and Fisheries).
Transferability
The Global Record of Stock and Fishery Knowledge Base will cover the World Seas and will provide information on fish stocks and fisheries to MSP practitioners of EU Seas as well. Data will be available at sub-regional sea level
Contact Person
Donatella Castelli
BLUEBRIDGE project coordinator
via G. Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy
E-mail: donatella.castelli@isti.cnr.it
Ph. +39 050 621 2902
Responsible Entity
National Research Council of Italy - Institute of Information Science and Technologies (CNR-ISTI) - Pisa, Italy
Costs / Funding Source
BlueBRIDGE receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 675680. The project budget is 5,295,753.75