Abstract
Over the last decade, West African coastal countries, including Ghana, have experienced extensive economic damage due to illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing activity, estimated at about USD 100 million in losses each year. Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing poses an enormous threat to the conservation and management of the dwindling fish stocks, causing multiple adverse consequences for fisheries, coastal and marine ecosystems and for the people who depend on these resources. The Integrated System for Surveillance of Illegal, Unlicensed and Unreported Fishing (INSURE) is an efficient and inexpensive system that has been developed for the monitoring of IUU fishing in Ghanaian waters. It makes use of fast-delivery Earth observation data from the synthetic aperture radar instrument on Sentinel-1 and the Multi Spectral Imager on Sentinel-2, detecting objects that differ markedly from their immediate background using a constant false alarm rate test. Detections are matched to, and verified by, Automatic Identification System (AIS) data, which provide the location and dimensions of ships that are legally operating in the region. Matched and unmatched data are then displayed on a web portal for use by coastal management authorities in Ghana. The system has a detection success rate of 91% for AIS-registered vessels, and a fast throughput, processing and delivering information within 2 h of acquiring the satellite overpass. However, over the 17-month analysis period, 75% of SAR detections have no equivalent in the AIS record, suggesting significant unregulated marine activity, including vessels potentially involved in IUU. The INSURE system demonstrated its efficiency in Ghana’s exclusive economic zone and it can be extended to the neighbouring states in the Gulf of Guinea, or other geographical regions that need to improve fisheries surveillance.
Highlights
The rising global demand for fish resources has made West African waters a hot spot for industrial fishing fleets from all over the world [1]
In Ghana, IUU fishing is the main threat to the local fisheries industry, evidenced by a reduction in fishery contribution to the gross domestic product GDP from 6% to 4.5% within the past two decades
At the processing stage, we aimed to reduce the number of false alarms in the pre-screening algorithm
Summary
The rising global demand for fish resources has made West African waters a hot spot for industrial fishing fleets from all over the world [1]. Over the last decades, the Gulf of Guinea (GoG) has seen a significant decline in marine fish capture, putting at risk the sustainable exploitation of natural resources in this region [2] In part, this decline is due to massive bycatch and discard problems, which have reduced marine resources and caused suffering to the coastal communities that depend upon them [3]. The seafood trade balance has moved from a USD 33 million surplus in 1997 to a USD 319 million deficit in 2013 [5] The impact of this loss is felt by about 10% of the population directly or indirectly engaged in fishing across 304 fish-landing communities along Ghana’s 550 km coastline
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