The following text is based on a response by Marine Scotland (Science) to a number of questions circulated by the WGDIM Co-Chairs to UK colleagues prior to the WGDIM meeting. It can be considered an initial response to some of the meeting’s late-breaking meeting ToRs. The original response has been augmented by WG dis-cussions.
The current and pending legal status of VMS data in the ICES area, including any issues that may hinder data use for scientific purposes and considering the status of VMS data in relation to the present and revised EU Data Collection Regulations.
A layman's view of the EU legislation makes this reasonably simple to interpret, but WGDIM does not have the relevant legal expertise to raise this response above that of a lay perspective. The EU VMS regulation (COMMISSION REGULATION (EC) No 2244/2003) provides for satellite monitoring data to be collected for vessels > 15m with the following access conditions under Article 14:
"Access to data:
1. Member States shall ensure that the Commission has, on specific request, remote access by online sessions to the computer files containing the data recorded by their FMC.
2. The data received in the framework of this Regulation shall be treated in a confi-dential manner."
This implies confidentiality between the Commission and the relevant data centre of the EU Member State. It is likely that this has hindered access for scientists to VMS data in Member States whose administrations (or fishing industries) adopt a conser-vative approach to data protection under this Regulation. However, under the re-vised Data Collection Framework (DCF) (COUNCIL REGULATION (EC) No 199/2008), VMS data provision to ‘end-users’ is explicitly addressed in the chapter entitled “USE OF DATA COLLECTED IN THE FRAMEWORK OF THE CFP”. Article 15 comprises several clauses, amongst which is stated:
"1. This Chapter shall apply to all data collected:
(a) under Regulations (EEC) No 2847/93, (EC) No 788/96, (EC) No 2091/98, (EC) No 104/2000, (EC) No 2347/2002, (EC) No 1954/2003, (EC) No 2244/2003
(b) (i) under the framework of this Regulation: data on vessels’ activity based on in-formation from satellite monitoring and other monitoring systems with the required format;"
, (EC) No 26/2004, (EC) No 812/2004, (EC) No 1921/2006, (EC) No 1966/2006 and (EC) No 1100/2007;
This clearly extends the scope of the DCF to data collected under the VMS regulation.
In addition, ‘this chapter’ covers 8 articles that specify the nature of data provision and access. This includes Article 18 which is fairly explicit and provides only a lim-ited exclusion clause:
"Article 18
Submission of detailed and aggregated data
1. Member States shall make detailed and aggregated data available to end-users to support scientific analysis:
(a) as a basis for advice to fisheries management, including to Regional Advisory Councils;
(b) in the interest of public debate and stakeholder participation in policy develop-ment;
(c) for scientific publication.
2. Where necessary, to ensure anonymity Member States may refuse to provide data on vessels’ activity based on information from vessel satellite monitoring to end-users for the purposes referred to in paragraph 1(b)."
COUNCIL REGULATION (EC) No 199/2008 also provides certain relevant defini-tions:
"Article 1
(e) ‘primary data’ means data associated with individual vessels, natural or legal persons or individual samples;
(f) ‘meta data’ means data giving qualitative and quantitative information on the collected primary data;
(g) ‘detailed data’ means data based on primary data in a form which does not allow natural persons or legal entities to be identified directly or indirectly;
(h) ‘aggregated data’ means the output resulting from summarising the primary or detailed data for specific analytic purposes;
(i) ‘end-users’ means bodies with a research or management interest in the scientific analysis of data in the fisheries sector;"
Consequently, to a lay audience, it appears that EU Member States are obliged to provided VMS data to an organisation such as ICES, both at the detailed and aggre-gated level. Certain caveats may apply. For example:
• does the current DCF apply retrospectively to data collected prior to 2009 – probably not?
• the VMS regulation only requires EU Member States to retain VMS data for three years, so end-users have a finite period in which to request the data from Member States before it could potentially be disposed of.
• the original Data Collection Regulation placed an expiry date on data pro-vided to end-users that limited the period in which it could be used. We do not think that applies under the current DCF.
This discussion relates only to EU Member States and does not reflect the position with other ICES members, for example, Norway. WGDIM was unable to provide such a perspective for non-EU ICES members.
Estimates of data quantities that can be expected from Vessel Monitoring Systems, including a consideration of VMS data temporal resolution in relation to its potential scientific uses, and any proposed or required changes in temporal resolution.
VMS data in the Marine Scotland (Science) database for 2008 contains data for 3735 vessels, representing not only all information for Scottish registered vessels, but boats of other nationalities entering or operating in Scottish waters at some point in a trip.
This contains 3.4 million position/speed/heading records after those where the vessel is travelling at less than 0.2 knots are filtered out. The VMS data recording frequency is generally 2 hourly. Any increase in the recording frequency would increase the size of the data set proportionately, although vessel details could be held relationally. It is easily conceivable that VMS records will extend to many millions per EU Member State per year.
Much of the implementation of the DCF is specified in an EU Commission Decision (20089/949/EC). In terms of the application of VMS data to ecosystem indicators, Ap-pendix XIII of the decision expresses a preference for a recording frequency of every 30 minutes, although this does not appear to be legislated and appears to be aspira-tional.
Although not referred to in the DCF, it would also be of benefit to require vessels be-tween 10 m and15 m to carry VMS equipment. These vessels make up a significant portion of many national fleets and are currently invisible to VMS-based analysis.
Investigation of organisations within the ICES area that currently archive or intend to archive VMS data and which allow access for scientific purposes
The statutory obligation of EU Member States has been discussed above with refer-ence to data from 2009 onwards. No attempt has been made to identify the position for ICES member countries that are not EU Member States, or for Member State data holdings prior to 2009.
A summary of what scientific tools are being developed by existing research programmes, in-cluding EU Framework projects, to analyse and interpret VMS data
It is known that a number of national institutes are developing methods to manage and filter VMS data for scientific and fishery management purposes; however, a full inventory was not available to WGDIM.
One relevant research programme was highlighted as being of specific relevance to ICES. Under the European Commission open call for tenders (No MARE/2008/10 - Studies for carrying out the common fisheries policy), the EU invited tenders for an 18 month commercial contract to develop tools for logbook and VMS data analysis (Lot 2). The tender specification listed the main aim of the study to be:
"1. To create a method to deal with classification of Logbooks data for the fleet based approach. This method should assure a standardized approach at a Regional level assuring the criteria homogeneity between Member states. As a result, it shall be pos-sible to automatically classify trips into metiers based on Logbooks species composi-tion, gear or group of gears and area of operation.
2. To facilitate and develop the scientific use of VMS data as the basis for the estima-tion of pressure indicators in support of an ecosystem approach to fisheries manage-ment."
The specification also relates the analysis of log book and VMS data to three of the fishing pressure indicators (distribution of fishing activity, aggregation of fishing ac-tivity and areas not impacted by mobile gears) identified under Appendix XIII of EU Commission Decision (20089/949/EC). The study is therefore intended to provide end-users with the tools required to provide advice on specific issues of relevance to the EU and, by implication, it is particularly relevant to ICES as an advisory body.
Explicitly, the study shall:
"1. Develop and test methods and produce protocols on how to present these indica-tors using GIS and how to link VMS databases to Logbooks.
2. Model the dependence of recording rate on the precision of the suggested indica-tors"
The contract was awarded in late spring 2008 to a consortium coordinated by IMARES (Netherlands) and will finish after 18 months.
In discussion, GIS experts advised WGDIM that the software platforms proposed for this study may not be suitable for fully operational purposes. A suggested action point is for the ICES Data Centre to maintain a watching brief during the develop-ment of this study (subject to approval of the consortium members and the EC) and to identify how best ICES can accommodate any tools/algorithms that are developed as may apply to its advisory remit.
Proposals for how ICES scientists and Expert Groups should gain access to VMS data in the future and what data interface, interrogation, display, analysis and interpretation tools ICES should ob-tain or develop.
The provision of VMS data to expert groups should be given the same priority as provision of fisheries landings and discard data. In the first instance, ICES needs to be kept in the loop regarding the Lot 2 consortium work described above, and to use that opportunity to better identify the additional database, visualisation and analytic toolset that will be required to address the most immediate of its MoU requests from the European Commission.
(This may be further complicated by the move towards electronic log book recording1
WGDIM was not in a position to comment authoritatively on the tool-set needed in relation to other VMS-based advisory requests that ICES may receive, other than to note that such requests are current and cannot afford to wait for the outcome of the Lot 2 project in circa 18 months time.
which, by the time it is fully implemented, may render additional possibilities for tying-in the log book data to the VMS data).
1 Corrigendum to Council Regulation (EC) No 1966/2006 of 21 December 2006 on electronic recording and reporting of fishing activities and on means of remote sens-ing