The Project

Antarctic krill is closely regulated by The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), a treaty organization with 25 member states and a stand-alone science committee. As the Antarctic fishery operates in such a vast and remote area, and krill is a highly variable species, having sufficient data to support the management system has long been pinpointed as a challenge. 

Now industry themselves have come up with a solution to support science.

How it works today   

To compensate for lacking up-to-date krill monitoring data, CCAMLR has set the krill catch limit at a fixed and very precautionary level equal to <1% of the estimated krill biomass in the area. However, biomass surveys have been performed at very long-time scales of ~20 years between the data points. So how do you know if the biomass situation is the same as 5, 10 or even 15 years ago? 

Together with Aker BioMarine, we aim to provide real-time data enabling scientists to get the data they need to do the biomass estimates at the temporal scales they desire, and in the long run, set catch levels dynamically in response to evidence on krill abundance reconciled with the needs of the ecosystem. ​

The project will set up an infrastructure for data transfer from the vessels and sensors to the Ocean Data Platform and make the relevant data available to industry, scientists, and regulatory bodies. By using close to real-time echo-sounder and sensor data from fishing vessels and unmanned ocean vehicles, we will create a best practice fishery management system and an application running on the Ocean Data Platform. 

Our project will create a self-service solution for data ingestion and easy accessibility to raw data for scientists to estimate krill biomass and advise on appropriate krill catch levels.

Status

The project is well underway, with the first upload of acoustic data being ingested into the Ocean Data Platform, and initial visualizations have been created. The development of a self-service solution running on the Ocean Data Platform is planned to complete by Q4 2021, after which the project will work on including other krill harvesting operators and also start to investigate the transferability into other types of fishing operations. 

Aker BioMarine has recently ordered an unmanned ocean vehicle from Kongsberg Maritime to collect valuable scientific data, as well as further reduce the carbon footprint and optimise krill harvesting in Antarctica.