The Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries (GRSF) was created as part of the BlueBRIDGE project (EU Horizon 2020) by FAO and partners as a key collaborative instrument to collectively support the global monitoring of fish stocks and fisheries status. It has been established as a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for fish stock and fisheries information, metadata, and related-tools in the iMarine e-infrastructure, which FAO has been co-developing in partnership for 10 years. GRSF relies on a robust IT platform (D4Science) that offers a great potential for future evolutions and functionalities development, beyond the main features that were implemented during the lifetime of BlueBRIDGE.

GRSF is designed to handle the information on stock monitoring that countries perform directly or through the Regional Fishery Bodies (RFBs). GRSF contributes to enhance the global monitoring by i) collating records from either national or regional sources, ii) organizing and storing stock information according to specific data standards and protocols which allow comparability between records and consistency of the database, and iii) assigning and publishing Global Unique Identifier for single stock standard identification. GRSF has already gathered and organized about 3,000 stock records from 3 participating partners’ data sources. The quality control and information cleaning work is in progress (e.g., identifying/connecting duplicates), and about 2,000 records for unique stocks are expected at the end of that process.

Many stakeholders from industry, NGOs, technology companies, etc. believe the success of technology companies to develop seafood traceability solutions to meet the future global demand is based on standardized fishery identifiers. To this end, about 9,000 fishery records (fishing operations) have been also gathered through the collation, processing and harmonization of source records. Likewise for Stocks, the final published number of fishery records is expected to be lower.

The GRSF proposes a global standard for Unique Identifiers of stocks and fisheries: i) a Universally Unique Identifier, machine readable code to respond to whatever global IT standard, and ii) a Semantic Identifier, human readable code with standard codes and labels.

A standardized and globally-accepted identifier system that could be used by managers, scientists, the seafood industry, and will help support (and evolve with) increasing demands and trends towards traceability, including a database of machine-readable unique identifiers for individual fisheries that other systems can pull from. The main technical challenge is the harmonization of the different existing standards (international, regional and national) from different data sources.
This comprehensive and transparent inventory of stocks and fisheries records across multiple data providers is expected to boost stocks and fisheries status and trend monitoring and promises to stimulate responsible consumer practices.

FAO with the GRSF partners is currently working on sustainable aspects to further develop the GRSF after the end of the BlueBRIDGE project.

This webinar presents the online catalogue of stocks and fisheries and focus on the methodology used to build the database (selection of data standards, unique identifiers logic, associated information to stock and fisheries). 

About the Speakers:

Aureliano Gentile

Aureliano Gentile has been involved in the development of information products in the FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture department since 2001. His initial background on marine biology and oceanography, and his experience as fishing observer were gradually complemented with skills on information management relevant to the fishery sector.

He is the focal point for the developments of many web components of the current Fisheries and Aquaculture (FI) knowledge base (FI fact sheets, FIRMS database, VME Database, Sharks Measures database, EAF Toolbox, etc.), and has large experience in liaising with Regional Fishery Bodies representatives as part of the FIRMS Partnership Secretariat (Fisheries and Resources Monitoring System). In recent years he was also involved in EU funded projects with leading roles for deliverables including iMarine data access and sharing policies and the ongoing development of the Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries.  

Giulia Gorelli

Giulia Gorelli is a fisheries information manager in FAO, working mainly within the Fisheries and Resources Monitoring System (FIRMS) collating stocks and fisheries data at global scale. Previously, she has been working at the Institute of Marine Sciences of Barcelona (Spain) for almost five years, where she conducted scientific research in fish stock assessment and fisheries management. She holds a PhD in Marine Sciences from the University of Barcelona.