Fishing Vessel Monitoring Systems: Past, Present and Future

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VMS: Past, Present and Future 4 1.0 Background The emergence of vessel monitoring systems (VMS) in world fisheries began in 1988 in Portugal, and the reasons that brought the Portuguese to establish their “MONICAP” system are very simple to grasp. The Portuguese fisheries authorities, like all of their European colleagues, had noticed a significant degradation in fish stocks as measured by volume of catches, size of individual species and research on available biomass. And whilst they reasoned that, at a very minimum, the first of remedial measures would be to ensure that the current management regime, consisting of limits on catch (quotas) and effort (measured in days at sea), they recognized that their resources dedicated to enforcement, measured in personnel, patrol vessels and patrol aircraft, were insufficient to ensure generalized compliance with that management regime. The reason for this was that a significant percentage of the time that resources were active was used in trying to locate fishing vessels, so as to verify the legality of their activities. Consequently, they decided that the remedy to this problem was to find a way of increasing the efficiency of their monitoring, control and surveillance (MCS) resources by remotely tracking the movements of their national fishing vessels. A research programme was initiated to develop a method of carrying out this tracking, and VMS was born. It is interesting to note that the reasoning behind the birth of the MONICAP system, as well as its technical solution, remain as valid today as they were 17 years ago. Many of the world’s fish stocks remain in a precarious state and, though VMS has been adopted in every region of the world, the architecture of each VMS bears a striking resemblance to the MONICAP system. Following on the heels of the Portuguese success, a number of countries implemented VMS on small to medium scales of between 30 to 150 vessels. Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia, French Polynesia and the USA all reported on successful implementations of VMS for MCS purposes. Many other countries conducted trials and trials gave way to the introduction of VMS in at least some key fisheries of certain countries as a mandatory legal requirement.
VMS: Past, Present and Future 5 1.1 Spread of VMS Early examples were Australia, New Zealand and the USA. When the European Union, in 1996, mandated VMS for all European fishing vessels of 24 meters overall or longer, VMS had come of age. Now, in 2005, it is difficult to find one of the principal flag or coastal states that is not already advanced in its use of VMS. Driving this push to implement VMS is the existence of the technology at an affordable price. The availability of the Inmarsat, Iridium, and Argos satellite communications systems globally, and the Euteltracs and Globalstar systems with more selective coverage, has created a competitive market for tracking vehicles of many types. This has led to improvements in services, software, hardware and reductions in the pricing of all these items. The implementation of the Global Positioning System (GPS) has added a new dimension to positioning accuracy and this technology is now pervasive in its use, with hand held GPS now within the economic reach of many individuals. In 2008 the European Galileo system is scheduled to go into operation and will provide its particular range of advantages, as we shall see later, However, the real motivation to implement VMS comes not from the technology itself but from the benefits it provides for managing fisheries. Declining global fish catches in the last decades of the 20 th century, mentioned above, have been well documented. The reasons for this decline are less well understood but it is clear that there has been a continuing large increase in fishing effort leading to declines in fish stocks. A point of interest is that the increase in fishing effort has been brought about not only by larger and more numerous fishing vessels, but also by the use of electronic, computing and satellite technologies. These same technologies are now being seen as one of the tools available to fisheries managers for achieving sustainable harvesting of fish. 1.2 VMS functionality VMS technology is seen as meeting two basic functions for the management of fish stocks. Typically, fisheries management rules are designed to achieve sustainable, harmonious and profitable fishing through a variety of methods. This usually includes some form of licensed vessel access to particular areas, restrictions on gear types, restrictions on fishing time, quotas on the amounts of particular species which may be taken, etc. To enable these rules to be a credible management tool, an effective MCS regime must be in place. It is this application for which VMS has mostly been targeted to date through providing
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