Data products for sustainable fisheries V1. ARCFISH Deliverable D3.1

This document describes the first version of new data products for sustainable fisheries developed in the ARCFISH project. This project is funded by the Research Councils of Norway (Research Council of Norway (RCN)), Portugal (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)), Poland (The National Centre for Research and Development, Poland (NCBR)), Denmark (Innovation Fund Denmark (IFD)) and Iceland (The Icelandic Centre for Research (RANNIS)), after successful evaluation of the proposals for the 2023 First Sustainable Blue Economy Partnership Joint Transnational Co-Funded Call.

ARCFISH will 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. However, the negative impacts of traditional economic activities such as overfishing, marine pollution, habitat destruction, and climate change have threatened the health and sustainability of the ocean, leading to declining fish stocks, loss of biodiversity, and increased coastal vulnerability to natural disasters. New data products and services, co-developed with relevant stakeholders, are needed to provide a better basis for decision-making in fisheries planning and management. For example, for Disko Bay, western Greenland, ecosystem indices based on an improved ecosystem model could include monthly spatial maps of zooplankton biomass and production, benthos biomass, shrimp biomass, and upwelling areas. Data collected around Iceland towards the Barents Sea onboard fishing vessels and in seafood processing could be implemented in the DTO to support relevant stakeholders. For the Arctic in general, potential new services could include advanced eLogbooks and spatio-temporal pattern detection and visualisation. For cost-efficiency these services must leverage novel digital technologies such as DTOs to acquire, process, analyse and visualise heterogeneous data from a wide range of sources.  

More information on the project can be found at: https://www.arcfish.eu/.