Using mobile device’s sensors to identify fishing activity

Abstract

Fisheries management is generally based on the regulation of the fishing effort, by limiting fishing capacity and activity. The fishing capacity can be quantified objectively, however, the calculation of the fishing activity requires knowing the effective fishing time, for which it is essential to monitor the vessels activity. The European Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) only describes the geographical position, course and speed of the vessel at 2-h intervals, it is an expensive system used only in vessels over 12 m in length and there are no common criteria to infer the fishing activity from the VMS data. To evaluate more precisely the fishing activity, we propose to incorporate new sensors in the vessels that provide additional information. The sensors of mobile devices offer an economic solution that would allow their implementation throughout the fishing fleet. The objective of this work is to evaluate whether the most common sensors integrated in current mobile devices: GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetic field, offer relevant information to identify the different phases of bottom trawling fishing activity. The results obtained indicate that these sensors detect, with very high precision, foreseeable changes in the movement of the vessel during the towing manoeuvre.