Developing Electronic Monitoring System (EMS) standards to collect scientific data: learning from experience with French and associated fleets of the Indian Ocean

During the last decades, Electronic monitoring (EM) has been progressively implemented and tested in tuna fisheries and various pilot projects have confirmed the potential of EM to collect scientific information, that could be useful to fulfil data requirements of the Regional Observer Scheme in the Indian Ocean. Nevertheless, as for any new tool, it is critical that EM minimum standards are discussed and adopted, before validating the wide use of EM in the Indian Ocean.

The aim of the present document is to contribute to the definition of EM minimum standards for scientific data collection on tropical tuna purse seine fleets of the Indian Ocean. This document reports on the shared experience of scientists, fleet managers, EM analysts and EM vendors in various EM pilot projects covering the French and associated tropical tuna purse seine fleet since 2014. Here, we review the results obtained for two types of scientific data collection needs : (i) data collection on discards, that is currently undertaken routinely to compensate for a lack of onboard observation, and (ii) data collection on retained catches, that is currently in development. Lessons learned from the two types of projects are used to make recommendations that could be used as guidelines when adopting EM minimum standards for scientific data collection purposes in IOTC.