Fish, a matter of scales
This demonstrator is jointly developed by the Information and knowledge management Team (NFISI) of the Fisheries Division, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the French National Research Institute and the Institute of Computer Science at FORTH.
The objective is to deliver a scalable and robust open data portal for fisheries data in EU waters and beyond, with a focus on a Global Tuna Atlas and a Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries (GRSF). Hence, the demonstrator expands the existing VREs of FAO Tuna Atlas and GRSF, with more features for data analysis using indicators, interactive maps, etc., for the former, and new as well as expanded information for approved status assessments of fisheries, including those from other sources and demonstrators for the latter.
- End-users: general public with an interest in stocks and fisheries, fish provenance, fisheries distribution, fisheries and SDG2 and SDG 14, accessed through e.g. web-portals, atlases, API’s or QR codes.
- Advanced users: regional fisheries data analysts that need to show how fisheries in their area of interest develop over time using fisheries analytical models and in relation to environmental variables and other ancillary data.
- Developers: system developers in need of a ‘boilerplate’ solution for the management of fisheries time-series on catch and effort that brings collated statistical data into a data harmonization and QA process.
- Fisheries Managers: regional fisheries managers that require access to overviews of fisheries to inform their management decision making processes.
Since 2023, the serviced developed within this demonstrators are being evolved within the Global Fisheries Atlas Virtual Lab, which is combining GRSF and the Global Tuna Atlas, thereby integrating and harmonising new datasets relevant for fisheries variables.
Services
The FIRMS Tuna Atlas is one result of the Blue-Cloud Fisheries Atlas Virtual Lab. The service behind is a mature Spatial Data Infrastructure (that is also used in the Aquaculture monitor demonstrator). The service allows to harmonise and standardise fisheries data to become uniform global datasets. This requires a complex workflow that has to be validated with the data providers in order to ensure high-quality datasets.
Over the years, this Atlas has been updated and improved by using and refining virtual research environments to meet specific community needs through support from a range of H2020 projects including Blue-Cloud and the software components of the Blue-Cloud Fisheries Atlas Virtual Lab. The Global Tuna Atlas demonstrates how the interoperability of fisheries data can be achieved, not only for tuna, but for a wide range of fisheries and related domains.
The Atlas offers a comprehensive view over the catches of fisheries targeting tuna and tuna-like species - going as far back as 100 years in some areas. Including bycatch, the Atlas disseminates data on 50 common species (however featuring information for up to 150 species in total). The aim was to release an open and FAIR principles based product, and this was achieved by complying with Dublin Core and DataCitestandards for general discovery and access services (for DOI's), as well as ISO-TC211 / OGC standards for geographic information management and CWP standards for fisheries data management.
In 2024 new versions of the FIRMS Tuna Atlas datasets have been generated and published on Zenodo.
The Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries (GRSF) offers a Catalogue and a Map Viewer. The GRSF service enables a semantic workflow for data alignment and harmonisation, and attaches a stable UUID to validated records. The records can be enriched with ancillary information such as capture time series, model output, and assessment reports. This makes the GRSF the only global catalogue and particularly suited to traceability needs.