Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative
Fisheries Uses and Values Project
Data Collection (commercial fleet)
After introductory meetings have been conducted with representatives of the fishing community, field staff will begin contacting fishermen to set up interviews. Interviews will be conducted using one-on-one or small group formats. Field staff will use Open OceanMap to collect shapes representing participants' fishing grounds and other non-spatial attributes, including demographics, basic operations (gear types, crew size/composition, operating costs and revenues), and other descriptive characteristics. Every measure will be taken to ensure and protect the confidentiality of the information provided by fishermen. This includes new functions in Open OceanMap, obtaining consent of individual participants, and collection and analysis protocols that mask all names and identifying characteristics of an individual's fishing grounds.
- All interviews will follow a shared protocol for each fishery the interviewee participates in:
- Using electronic nautical charts of the area, fishermen are asked to identify all areas that are of critical economic importance over their cumulative fishing experience, and to rank these using a weighted percentage — an imaginary "bag of 100 pennies" that they distribute over the fishing grounds.
- All spatial information will be collected on a fixed spatial scale, ideally to correspond with those of other maps and GIS layers used by stakeholders to delineate MPA alternatives;
- Non-spatial information pertaining to demographics and basic operations will also be collected.
- Additional indicators will help further define how the participants interpret the question of ranking areas that are of economic importance to them:
- How far they travel to an area to fish
- The type of vessel and gear used
- Percentage of household income derived from fishing
- To address concerns regarding the protection of a participant's confidentiality during and after the interview, we have customized Open OceanMap so that once the last shape of the fishing grounds has been captured:
- The shapefile is immediately compressed using a password protected zip file.
- The original shapefile will be deleted and the secure zip file will be submitted to Ecotrust staff.
- Ecotrust staff will be the only ones that will have password access to the files.
- Users will not be allowed to add existing or previously created data to Open OceanMap.
