Smart Fishing
The Smart Fishing project was designed to make face to safety and sustainability issues in artisanal fishing through the community-based development of an Integrated Technological Solution.
Background
It is essential to rethink an element of Portuguese culture: artisanal fishing and its relationship with the environment. ‘Smart Fishing’ is a project that consists of actions in coastal territories that motivate local fishermen to participate in decisions that affect their professional life, through ocean and river literacy that demonstrates the importance of sustainability in artisanal fishing.
In a profound ethnographic process of integration with local communities for over 10 years, it was outlined that fishing security would be the main point to be explored, collectively rethought and reconfigured. To respond to this community need, the design of the ‘Smart Fishing’ project was based on an Integrated Technological System (ITS) for sustainability and safety in artisanal fishing, based on three axes of knowledge: local, technical and scientific knowledge.
Today, the project involves eight fishing communities in the coastal area of Almada in a series of meetings and events with the direct involvement of lawmakers, in partnership with the ‘Ocean Literacy Observatory’ integrated in the research laboratories of the ‘Centro MARE’ of the NOVA School of Science and Technology | FCT NOVA. An electronic device was conceived and built collectively – there are 3 hands: local, technical and scientific allowing the ITS to be used with meaning and belonging to the fishing communities involved.
Technology overview
Further details
Stage of Development
TRL 3 – experimental proof of concept
Benefits
“The great advantage of this technology is particularly the sense of belonging to the integrated technological system (ITS) of security by the artisanal fisherman, making him use the device because he knows it, defined it in his needs and possibilities for its use and the he understood as fundamental to the saving of his life, his vessel and the re-linking of sustainability in his fishing gear.
Other benefits include:
- the act of participation of the fishermen in decision-making processes of their professional life;
- the knowledge of the regional symptoms that affect artisanal fishing because they are participating in meetings in which members of all communities in the region, with different arts and issues of safety and sustainability, were present;
- the computer training of artisanal fishermen that the project development process had to carry out, combating the info-exclusion that exists in these resilient coastal communities.”
Opportunity
Seeking investment
Keywords
Artisanal Fishing; Ocean Grabbing; Participative Technology; Fishing Community Emancipation; Transdisciplinarity.
Intellectual Property
Know-how based.
NOVA Inventors
Mónica Mesquita
