We are pleased to announce that The Gear Fund awarded funds to nine organizations, committed to implementing open standards determined by NOAA and DFO, to develop products to support gear location marking, lost gear recovery, gear retrieval and enforcement.

The Fishing Gear Location Marking Fund grants awarded in 2024 totaled $466,000 to the Organization and Project Titles below:

Ashored Inc. -The integration of Ashored's ATLAS gear tracking and location software fo seamless interoperability: use cases for gear owners, other fishermen and fisheries, law enforcement and fishery regulators.

delResearch LLC- Fontus Realtime Embedded software

Devocean Inc- Collaborating Toward Interoperability in Ropeless Fishing

LiftLabs Inc- Innovative Integration: Advancing Open Standards in On-Demand Fishing Gear Location Marking with LiftLabs Buoy-On-Demand System

Nova Robotics- Active Housing Acoustic Transducer with Depth Sensing - A Solution to the “Slant-Distance” Localization Problem

Ropeless Systems Inc- Implementation and Testing of the FONTUS Protocol

SMELTS- Skipper Scan Automatic Gear Marking of Buoyless Bottom Set Fixed Gear

Sub Sea Sonics- An Open-Source Central Command Unit for On-Demand Fishing Systems

Teledyne Benthos- Support for FONTUS Protocol Definition and Implementation on a Teledyne Acoustic Modem