Ecotrust in the News
San Francisco Chronicle
December 7, 2008
By Deborah Gage
State using new tech device to manage fisheries
(12-07) 16:19 PST — Good fishermen know where the best fishing grounds are — they can tell by the depth of the water, the landmarks on the shore, and the latitudes and longitudes they've stored in their Global Positioning Systems.
But getting fishermen to share that knowledge with the people trying to regulate fishing grounds is not easy.
"There's a stigma out there that every time data is used, it's used against fishermen," said Ben Sleeter, a geographic researcher and recreational fisherman from El Granada.
That attitude is changing, however, because of a Web-based tool that combines what fishermen know with other more conventional data collected by the California Department of Fish and Game.
Researchers have been toting laptops loaded with the tool, called Open OceanMap, to show fishermen nautical charts of the California coast. They ask the fishermen to privately mark and weight the fishing grounds they value most. Each fisherman is assigned an ID so he can log in and verify his choices without showing them to competitors.
Read the full article at SF Chronicle »
E-mail Deborah Gage at dgage@sfchronicle.com.
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