Increasing Food Security Through Liberation of Fishing and Aquaculture Data

The Challenge

Australia’s food sector suffers from segmented (siloed) data that is often inaccessible or incompatible to users. A digitally connected food sector is modelled to increase Australian agriculture’s gross value of production (GVP) by 25% and will also increase fisheries and aquaculture sector GVP by 44%¹.

The Response

This project will create a national data platform to safely share fishing and aquaculture data. The platform will unlock the value of unused or underutilised fishing and aquaculture data through best practice standardisation, ingestion, security, storage, cataloguing and analysis.

Who Will Benefit

• Fisheries and aquaculture industry
• Researchers
• State government agencies

The Partners

• Fisheries Research and Development Corporation (FRDC) (lead)
• ARDC
• South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI)
• Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, Western Australia Government (DPIRD)
• Australian Council of Prawn Fisheries Ltd
• Spencer Gulf & West Coast Prawn Fishermen’s Association Inc.
• Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS)
• Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) at the University of Tasmania
• SeaHarvest
• More Than Machines
• Eratos
• Real Time Data
• Catchlog

Target Outcomes

A data storage platform and ingestion pipelines will be delivered to securely share high quality Australian fisheries and aquaculture data provided by commercial, research and industry organisations to generate new knowledge for research, industry, and commercial organisations and decision-makers. The data platform will: 

• provide access to analysis tools that allow researchers (e.g. from industry, management, or research organisations) to gain insights without moving data outside the storage platform 
• be complemented by a data catalogue to aid discoverability of Australian fisheries datasets.  
• pair rich contextual metadata to datasets stored and catalogued, using agreed community metadata standards.

A fisheries-focused data governance framework will also be delivered to allow platform setting and enforcing controls that provide greater data access, security and privacy.

Through an extension and adoption stream post project, the project will increase capacity and capability in the use of Australian fisheries data through an extension and adoption stream post project, ensuring researchers can access and learn about the available data and services.

Key Resources

Read the project description from FRDC.

¹Perrett, E. H. (2017). Accelerating precision agriculture to decision agriculture – analysis of the economic benefit and strategies for delivery of digital agriculture in Australia. Sydney: Australian Farm Institute.