Requirement specification. ARCFISH Deliverable 1.2

The aim of the ARCFISH project is to develop a pilot Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO), supporting sustainable fisheries in the Arctic. The DTO will be based on the existing Blue Insight platform that seamlessly supports the market segments of the ocean observing value chain of the New Blue Economy (Heslop et al., 2022). The New Blue Economy, also known as the Sustainable Blue Economy (SBE), is a concept that promotes sustainable development and conservation of ocean resources for economic, social, and environmental benefits. In the Arctic, sustainable fisheries focusing on achieving long-term sustainability and resilience of ocean ecosystems and communities is the key to uphold good living conditions for its residents. The project will target two key regions for Arctic fisheries: (1) Western Greenland, centred around Disko Bay, and (2) region around Iceland, northwards to the Svalbard archipelago and the Barents Sea.

Workshops, brainstorming and individual meetings have been held with stakeholders to develop requirement specifications for the two use cases in this project. The work has included analysing available and missing data, issues with sharing the data, identifying what benefits are in coupling the data, addressing privacy issues, and this report suggest functionality for the final solutions and the DTO.

The ARCFISH project aims to have results that support scientists, policy makers and resource users to make better informed decisions for sustainable Arctic Fisheries. Therefore, it is essential to develop solutions that are in line with their requests and expectations.

The requirements from different stakeholders are different and some are outside the scope of this project. But there are others that can be implemented into the DTO. There are different needs between areas. The Disko Bay is a small area with high interannual variability and there is stakeholder interest if the DTO can support fishery management and predict ecological indices for fisheries in relation to short-term future changes and climate change impacts. They asked if the ecological indices could include maps of hot-spots of productivity and recruitment areas to assist in habitat and larvae protection. For fisheries management, mapping ecological properties and fishing activity (e.g., trawling) could aid legislation and decision-making related to fishing bans or allowances, as well as estimating the impact of trawling and there is interest in the DTO accessibility after the project ends.

The bigger fishing companies will need to adopt standardized methods for sustainability reporting. To efficiently gather and report data, fishing companies will likely need to invest in technology solutions for data collection, tracking emissions and managing environmental impacts. The DTO could be a part of those tools and platforms, supporting environmental and sustainability reporting and supporting them in minimizing fishing effort, while getting the same volumes and values.

The functionality of the DTO for the Directorate of Fisheries could potentially be around the monitoring of possible discard practices. Most of the fisheries are mixed catches with several species, although the captain is usually trying to fish the main species, he has quota for. If the mix of landed fish species not in line with what is expected for certain fishing area, during specific fishing time or season and for the fishing gear used the DTO could import environmental information for the area to estimate if there are potential changes in environmental factors or zooplankton, that could result in changes in catch composition.