Untitled - CNR

A New Observing System for the Collection ofFishery and Oceanographic DataP. Falco 1 , A. Belardinelli 2 , M. Martinelli 2 , N. Cingolani 2 , E. Arneri 2,3 , A.Russo 4,2 , A. Santojanni 21, Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Napoli “Parthenope”, Italy2, Institute of Marine Sciences, CNR, Ancona, Italy3, Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO AdriaMed Project, Roma, Italy4, Polytechnic University of Marche, Ancona, Italya.santojanni@ismar.cnr.itAbstractFishing vessels represent a great opportunity to carry out repeated and continuousobservations on both fishing and environmental parameters in coastal areas. In 2003,a Fishery Observing System (FOS) was developed by ISMAR- CNR, within theframework of the EU research program Mediterranean Forecasting System: Towardan Environmental Prediction (MFSTEP), with the aim to exploit this great potential.Eight fishing vessels belonging to Adriatic fleet, targetting anchovy and sardine, wereequipped with FOS instrumentation in order to collect geo-referenced catch data,associated with in-situ temperature and depth.The system is nowadays still working in the Adriatic Sea, collecting very importantdata for the evaluation of the fishing effort and the influence of the environment onthe abundance distribution of the target species.1 IntroductionReal time estimates of stock abundanceand its spatial and temporal distributionsare very difficult to obtain. Acoustic surveysand landings information are the traditionaltools used to achieve an evaluationon fish populations’ abundance [1, 2, 3].These methods showed to be effective forscientific purposes and a posteriori evaluations.On the other hand, acoustic surveysdo not adequately cover the stock spatialextent and their temporal coverage isgappy because of the difficulty to carry outsurveys regularly. Moreover landings dataprovided at a later time are useless for managementand operational purposes, consideringthe fact that in these contexts, datashould be delivered in near real time.In order to overcome the limits of theabove mentioned methods, in the year2003, within the framework of the EU researchprogram “Mediterranean ForecastingSystem: Toward an Environmental Prediction”(MFSTEP), ISMAR - CNR developeda Fishery Observing System (FOShereafter). The main objective of the FOSwas that to obtain a continuous monitoringof the fish abundance distribution, bymeans of geo and time referenced abundanceindexes (Catch Per Unit of Effort -CPUE). In addition, relationships betweenthe environmental conditions and the distributionof the target species could be inves-