News
SAFARI Symposium
SAFARI held its International Symposium on Remote Sensing and Fisheries from February 15-17, 2010 in Kochi, India More…
IOCCG Monograph
IOCCG Report 8, entitled "Remote Sensing in Fisheries and Aquaculture", has been published and is now available for distribution. A digital copy can be found here…
Science Articles
A series of Spring 2009 articles in Science takes a look at shrimp populations, algal blooms and climate change. More…
PICES Symposium
There will be an international symposium on Climate Change Effects on Fish and Fisheries: Forecasting Impacts, Assessing Ecosystem Responses, and Evaluating Management Strategies, to be held in April 2010 in Sendai, Japan More…
The SAFARI Initiative
Earth observation has a great deal of potential to benefit society through activities covered generally under the heading Fisheries and Aquaculture (see article from Platt et al. in "The Full Picture", GEO publication, 2007). The primary objective of the SAFARI Project is to integrate the activities of selected experts in fisheries and Earth Observation (EO) to accelerate the pace of assimilation of EO into fisheries research and ecosystem-based fisheries management on a world scale. SAFARI will also help to build capacity at the science level and the operational level, and facilitate the application of rapidly evolving satellite technology to fisheries management questions.
Earth Observation Initiatives
Existing Projects
Among the existing elements that will be highlighted under SAFARI are:
- Japanese initiatives to correlate remotely-sensed observations with fishing success by enlisting fishermen as collectors of relevant field data
- An international programme in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean (SHRIMP) to relate relative abundance and growth of the Northern Shrimp to ecosystem fluctuations as indexed by remote sensing of ocean colour
- The successful Indian work deducing Potential Fishing Zones (PFZ) from remotely-sensed imagery and disseminating the results to artisanal fishermen in vernacular languages, also Korean work on Fishery Ground Index (FGI)
- A Canadian programme on developing ecological indicators for the pelagic zone from EO data, linking them with indicators derived from field observations, and evaluating their utility for ecosystem-based management (Canadian Space Agency GRIP initiative)
- Southern African work on integrated, ecosystem-based management of the Benguela ecosystem
New Projects
The following are some examples of the kinds of projects that will be developed under SAFARI:
- Establishing a clear and functional link with the outputs from the GEO Task EC-06-07 (ChloroGIN) and Task AG-06-02
- Canadian work using remote sensing imagery for identification of harmful algal blooms in context of aquaculture (Canadian Space Agency GRIP initiative), also the SCOR/IOC Global Ecology & Oceanography of Harmful Algal Blooms (GEOHAB)
