FAO, Italian research panel to cooperate on fisheries

Rome, Nov 18 (IANS/AKI) The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation and Italy's National Research Council (CNR) have agreed to strengthen their collaboration on iMarine, a cloud-based community platform to help improve fisheries management, FAO said in a statement on Monday.

The agreement assures that FAO's extensive knowledge of fisheries and aquaculture will be further integrated in the iMarine's portal and can be used in data research and development projects, the statement said.

It was signed on the sidelines of the first day of the International Symposium on Fisheries Sustainability that FAO is hosting this week.

The iMarine cooperation allows scientists from CNR and around the world to promote Open Data and Open Science. This is useful when defragmenting research data and also in developing reusable and cost-effective monitoring tools useful across marine and food sciences, the statement added.

The new Memorandum of Understanding aids cooperation in a range of areas from databases on vulnerable marine ecosystems, global atlas initiatives for tuna and aquaculture, fish stock assessment tools and the Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries, according to the statement.

The Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries provides support information allowing fisheries managers, policy makers and stakeholders to monitor the status of fish stocks and contribute to traceability, certification and quality control programmes.

The planned aquaculture atlas will provide a reference service for detecting and quantifying aquaculture farming structures - mostly cages and ponds - using satellite information in combination with computation of spatial features, said the statement.

iMarine was launched in 2015 to establish and operate an e-infrastructure to support an ecosystem approach to fisheries management and conservation of marine living resources, and it ultimately aims at supporting FAO's Blue Growth Initiative. The BGI seeks ways to balance economic growth, social development, food security, and sustainable use of aquatic resources, according to FAO.