John Bakum
Alexander Tilley
A new paper in SoftwareX describes the design and impact of Peskas, a free software to monitor and visualize small-scale fisheries in near real-time.
The digital agriculture revolution over the past 25 years has generated a tidal wave of data. The promise of more precise information leading to more efficient food production has been achieved in some areas, but access to technology and information, and the capacity to use it to improve wellbeing, remains strongly constrained by poverty.
“Small-scale fisheries are the furthest behind the curve for several reasons.” says author Alexander Tilley, WorldFish senior scientist. “The ‘crop’ [fish or other aquatic foods] is often invisible and highly mobile. The types of fishing and species targeted are highly diverse; fishing is hazardous and often an informal livelihood. This makes them very difficult to monitor.”
These fisheries support ~50 million jobs worldwide and billions of healthy diets, yet we know very little about them. Data like catch volume, composition and fishing effort, are vital to understanding current fisheries sustainability, but monitoring systems themselves are very difficult to sustain due to logistical, financial and capacity challenges in low-income countries.
WorldFish researchers set out to develop a solution to these issues by co-designing and building a free-to-use software platform called Peskas. Peskas is modular, so allows for different bits of it to be used to strengthen existing systems where needed.
Six Modules Pick-and-Mix
Much of the fisheries data in low- and middle- income countries is still collected on paper and transcribed and summarized into excel for analysis and aggregation. The data collection module provides a simple workflow to collect digital information directly on a tablet so it can be sent directly to the cloud.
Pre-processing is the module where data are cleaned, transformed and organized for analysis.
To err is human, so Peskas is equipped with a validation module to identify outliers or repeated data so they can be corrected or removed from the analysis.
Once data are in a standardized format, they can be analyzed automatically, saving time and effort of repetitive tasks. The Peskas analysis module leapfrogs a capacity and a time lag caused by relying on scientists and analysts to crunch the numbers.
The resulting information can be presented in pdf or table reports for sharing to different stakeholders (data export module) or viewed on an interactive dashboard – the vizualisation module such as can be seen on the Peskas website. This offers interactive 3D maps and time series information of catch, revenue at different spatial scales.
The Peskas software was piloted, refined and scaled nationally in Timor-Leste, showcasing its adaptability and scalability in a real-world context. The design principles of Peskas — free to use, open-source, adaptable and scalable, component-based— make it suited for the small-scale sector which is often poorly resources, yet critical for local livelihoods and food security.
“Any software solution needs to be user-friendly or people won’t engage with it” said lead author Lorenzo Longobardi, a WorldFish Data Scientist. “So, we co-designed Peskas with government fisheries officers, and adapted it gradually in response to their feedback.”
Data gathered by Peskas was used to guide the drafting of Timor-Leste’s National Fisheries Strategy in 2018, and in 2020, Timor-Leste adopted Peskas as their national monitoring system and invested in new enumerators for every coastal municipality.
The Peskas dashboard has had over 2400 visitors from 86 countries and has been cited in 31 publications since 2020.
Expanding Across the Global South
With experiences learned in Timor-Leste, the Asia-Africa BlueTech Superhighway (AABS) project brought representatives from Kenya, Mozambique, and Tanzania to Timor-Leste to examine Peskas and discuss ways it can be rolled out in their countries.
“A crucial aspect of AABS is South-South collaboration,” said Tilley. “Peskas is a great example of a technology that enables such relationships, where solutions are tailored to specific countries, but information can be shared.”
“Peskas is open source, so it is free for others to adapt to other fisheries, countries, languages and sectors” said Longobardi. “We are working on training modules to teach new fisheries staff to adapt these systems for themselves.”