Fish Mainland: Going digital to preserve a precious taonga

Fish Mainland chairman, Larnce Wichman ONZM, has seen New Zealand fisheries from just about every angle in a career that’s spanned 44 years in commercial rock lobster fisheries, industry groups, and representing the interests of recreational fishers in the South Island.

With growing pressure on fish stocks around the country, tensions often emerge between commercial and recreational fishers around the impact of both on marine species and the appropriate levels of allowable catch.

But Wichman, who developed the first voluntary logbook programme for the rock lobster fishery, which has since been digitised and expanded with great success, knows the value of cold, hard data when it comes to fisheries management.

“Politics does nothing for the fisheries,” he says. “Evidence-based decision-making is what matters,” says Wichman.

That’s why he and Fish Mainland’s directors, along with their Chief Executive Officer, Randall Bess, have devoted countless hours to planning and creating Mainland Catch, a smartphone app that makes it easy for Fish Mainland’s members and non-members alike to accurately report their fishing catch.

With a few taps in the app and a quick snap of the smartphone’s camera, fishers from the Marlborough Sounds to Stewart Island can record their identity, date, location, species and size of fish caught, and include a photo of their catch. One app user can enter catch data on behalf of the whole fishing party.

The data is then uploaded to Fish Mainland’s cloud platform where it can offer real-time insights into recreational fishing efforts around the South Island’s coast. No personal data from recreational fishers is publicly released, with anonymised data used in Fish Mainland reporting.

Early benchmarking of the data produced by Mainland Catch against regular fishing surveys and boat ramp surveys shows that it only takes a fraction of the South Island fishers reporting via the app to produce accurate data that can provide actionable insights.

“The information gathered can help inform whether catch limits in a recreational fishery need to be adjusted, and to guide setting and adjusting the size and location of marine reserves,” says Wichman.

Development of the Mainland Catch app, funded by the Ministry for Primary Industries’ Sustainable Food & Fibre Futures fund, and the Myers Foundation Trust, was well underway when the project hit a snag with the small tech company tasked with building it but unable to adequately resource the project. A referral from the company’s owner led Wichman and Bess to the door of Datacom in search of a new technology partner.

“We had no idea Datacom was the biggest tech company in New Zealand. We heard back from Grant Newport in Datacom’s Nelson office within half a day, and from the first meeting with him and his colleague Steve, we knew we were in good hands,” says Wichman.

Datacom set to work quickly, re-engineering the app using the Flutter platform and optimising it to connect to Microsoft’s Azure cloud for real-time data sharing.

“The way it was set up originally meant that the app’s performance would degrade as fishers added more fishing data to it. Datacom’s team flagged that as an issue immediately and fixed it.”

The original database underpinning Mainland Catch was also overhauled to make it easier for Fish Mainland to make sense of the accumulated data.

“Now you can drop a GPS location, and enter the name of the fish species, and it will give details of all the fish caught between those two points. It’s incredibly easy to use,” says Wichman.

Datacom assisted Fish Mainland in securing the correct international ISO certifications for the system and is now offering training to Fish Mainland officials on using data visualisation tools to aid in reporting the data.

The self-reporting system was initially developed in response to concerns over the health of the South Island blue cod fishery, where a traffic light system has been established to guide fishing activity.

With a soft launch of the app in the fishing off-season, the first major test of Mainland Catch was earlier this year, with the opening of the PAU 3A Kaikōura fishery for pāua. The 5-tonne allowance for the region was quickly exceeded.

Mainland Catch was able to accurately identify the extent of recreational fishing underway in the region.

“We’ve tested the data to the extent that it can feed into the Ministry for Primary Industries’ Fisheries Science Working Group.”

“That’s a huge milestone for recreational fisheries management,” says Wichman.

Recreational fishers have welcomed the app’s arrival, says Wichman, as they know evidence-based management will help to preserve the long-term health of South Island fish stocks.

The aim now is to ramp up awareness of Mainland Catch in preparation for the summer, when large numbers of boaties and coastal fishers will once again head out in search of kaimoana. Wichman sees the potential for Mainland Catch to expand nationally, and customised reports could generate fees to help sustain Fish Mainland’s non-profit operations.

“Our team has loved being part of this project, which is helping to capture and make sense of important fishery data,” says Grant Newport, from Datacom’s App Digital Engineering team. “We’re really proud of the fact we’ve helped deliver a responsive, scalable application that’s easy to use and that will ultimately help support informed decision-making for New Zealand fisheries.”

Datacom continues to innovate with the app’s design and features. A computer vision system is being tested to integrate it into the app, which would allow the species of fish photographed by app users to be automatically identified.

“What Datacom has developed for us is going to be game-changing in the whole fisheries management regime,” Wichman concludes.

“We got much more than we ever thought we would from Mainland Catch, thanks to having a partner that understood our needs and could help us realise our vision.”