NetTag - Tagging fishing gears and enhancing on board best-practices to promote waste free fisheries, project aims to reduce and prevent marine litter derived from fisheries, bringing together scientists, engineers and the fisheries industry.
NetTag approach combines two different types of preventive measures:
NetTag will develop new technologies to track fishing gears in case gears got lost, fostering a reduction of lost gears. The technology will include low cost, miniature and environmental-friendly acoustic tags and acoustic transceivers for uniquely localization (with fisher’s personal ID) of lost gear and an automated-short-range robotic recovery system. Participant fishers will, then, evaluate the new technology in a dedicated demonstrative field action.
Awareness actions, developed by fishers for fishers, will be an innovative strategy to engage the fishing industry, increasing fishers’ willingness to act and adopt better practices on-board to reduce marine litter from fishing vessels. In parallel, we will assess the reduction of environmental impact of lost gears as a new pollutant. We will also evaluate the cost-efficiency of the proposed solutions, estimating the economic viability of their implementation for reduction of marine litter derived from fisheries.
The project is based on synergistic activities between fishers and scientists to pilot innovative solutions to tackle the urgent need of reduction and prevention of marine litter.
