Ships of Opportunity - Fisheries vessels - Real time

Fisheries Vessels as Ships of Opportunities (FishSOOP) is an IMOS Sub-Facility working with fishers to collect real-time temperature and depth data by installing equipment on a network of commercial fishing vessels using a range of common fishing gear.

Every day, fishing vessels operate broadly across the productive areas of Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone where we have few subsurface ocean measurements. The FishSOOP Sub-Facility is utilising this observing opportunity to cost-effectively increase the spatial and temporal resolution of subsurface temperature data in Australia’s inshore, shelf, upper-slope, and offshore waters. The data is currently returned to each fishing boat in near-real time, so skippers can relate their catches to temperature-at-depth information. The same data will also be collated to provide oceanographers with quality-controlled data for ground-truthing coastal models and to improve analysis and forecasts of oceanic conditions.

The IMOS funded data collection, follows on from a Fisheries Research and Development Corporation (FRDC) funded pilot project (2022-007) with the University of New South Wales, Fishwell Consulting and IMOS. In the first year of the project 32 commercial fishing vessels had been equipped with sensors. They covered a range of fishing vessels, including scallop dredges, tuna longlines, shark gillnets, otter board trawlers, lobster pots, fish traps, prawn trawlers, squid jigs, and danish seines. We also had a pre-trial test with one boat the year prior, with the sensor installed on a trawler.