Fishing Vessel Monitoring Systems: Past, Present and Future

VMS: Past, Present and Future 40
Other regional fisheries management organisations are also moving toward
transparency as visits to the websites of the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries
Organization (NAFO), the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine
Living Resources (CCAMLR), the International Commission for the Conservation
of Atlantic Tuna (ICAAT) and the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC) will
demonstrate. Furthermore, there are strong indications that cooperation will
continue to move in the right direction, as both the establishment of the Western
and Central Pacific Tuna Commission, mentioned earlier, and an on-going
initiative in the Indian Ocean, under the auspices of the Indian Ocean
Commission (IOC) would indicate.
6.6 A question of content
Regardless of the administrative framework chosen for sharing VMS data, there
are a number of technical decisions, relating to form, content and methodology
that must be made before the first files are transferred.
The content is a potentially complex issue, particularly when future
manifestations and improvements in VMS are taken into consideration. It
is also key to recognize that the data sets necessary for a fisheries
management operation will be gathered from two sources: the fishing
vessel itself (position and, eventually, catch) and the management
authority (administrative data), be it flag state, coastal state or regional
organisation, monitoring that vessel. Furthermore, the inputs from these
sources will be of two kinds: data provided automatically by autonomous
systems like sensors and navigation devices, or provided manually by
either crews aboard fishing vessels or fisheries protection personnel. The
following are examples of the most common data sets that would be found
in a VMS operation:
Fishing vessel position: the output of an automatic navigation system,
most often Global Positioning System, transmitted over a mobile
communications system. Position takes the form of latitude and longitude,
normally either in ASCII or bit-mapped format. Position is usually
accompanied by the heading and speed of the vessel being tracked. All
three values are standard GPS output but their inclusion, or not, in a
position report is determined by the size of the position report file chosen
by the authorities.
Patrol vessel and patrol aircraft position and response zone: Input
will be identical in form and content to that provided by fishing vessels, but
should be kept in a separate, ephemeral file to be compared with system
generated events. The file on each patrol vessel and aircraft will contain a
response radius figure, which is the maximum distance to which that