Report of the DCC Meeting for the Review of Longline Electronic Monitoring (EM) Data Fields

An initial meeting to review the standardisation of Longline E-Monitoring data fields for member countries of the SPC, FFA and PNAO was conducted in February 2020. This initial meeting produced draft DCC Longline EM minimum data fields in considering the following key criteria:
1. The importance for both science and compliance objectives, with some guidance provided by the recent SPC/FFA/PNAO Regional Longline EM Planning/Policy workshop1 and outcomes of the pre-workshop survey;
2. The philosophy of the WCPFC Project 93 (WCPFC-SC15-2019/ST-WP-042), which is an initiative to review the various sources of the data obtained from the tuna fisheries in order to, inter alia, more efficiently collect data by removing redundancy, promote synergy between the different data collection programmes and consider which source of data is the most appropriate as the primary source and those data sources which are most appropriate for verification only.
3. The efficiency and practicality of collecting each data field through EM. This criterion used the outcomes/decisions of previous EM Process Standards workshops, but more importantly, the meeting used the experience of member countries that have conducted EM trials over the past 3-5 year as the basis for deciding whether it was efficient/practical to collect the data field.
This information paper provides the report of this meeting which includes the draft DCC Longline E-Monitoring data fields and recommendations from the meeting.
This paper is provided to inform the WCPFC Scientific Committee of these developments and will also be made available to the WCPFC ER and EM Working Group meeting and the 16th Meeting of the WCPFC Technical and Compliance Committee (TCC16), both meetings to be conducted in late 2020.