Fishing vessel traffic data derived from Automatic Identification System (AIS) has become an essential component for building fisheries intelligence.  Enforce and related fisheries management strategies rely on such information to curb illegal fishing, plan and implement policies for the sustainability of marine living resources. 

Fisheries managers and enforcers require specialized skills to processes the large volume of positional, navigational and voyage related information embedded in AIS data.  Open-source programming software such as Python has lots of third-party modules for building packages and functions.  This makes Python an asset for the creation of customized data processing, analyses and visualization to support in making informed decisions in the management of natural resources.   

This training course will provide participants an understanding of the movement of fishing vessels and skills in processing AIS data.

Learning Outcomes 

After the course participants will be:

• Familiar with fishing operations and the use of electronic monitoring tools such as AIS/VMS for fisheries management
• Load and select various fields in an AIS data file
• Process AIS data to understand fishing behaviour
• Analyze various movement parameters to detect fishing infractions to support fisheries enforcement

Target Audience 

The target audience includes, but is not limited to the following:

• researchers
• fisheries officers
• students interested in the use of spaceborne tracking platforms for marine living resource management

 Note: UNESCO is committed to promote equal access principles. Applications from minority or underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged. 

Course Pre-requisites 

Applicants are expected to have: 

• an interest or new responsibilities in working with marine data and/or information related to fisheries
• a working knowledge of English
• basic programming skills using Python

Course content 

• introduction to fisheries electronic monitoring tools
• introduction to Python
• Jupyter Notebook and other relevant packages (pandas, numpy etc)

Instructor

• Kwame Adu Agyekum (University of Ghana)

Language of Instruction

English 

Course Format and Duration

10 days (30 online learning hours plus pre-course preparation assignments)

Application process

Period for application is 1-19 November 2021. Complete the online application form at https://bit.ly/3zxp71P 

This course was initially planned for December 2021, but has been postponed to January 2022.

Costs

No tuition fee.

Contacts

• RTC Ghana/Course Organiser: Dr Benjamin O. Botwe (bbotwe@ug.edu.gh)
• OTGA Secretariat ioc.training@unesco.org

In case of need for further clarifications please use the contact(s) above, always using as email subject the name of the course.