Developing the Fund
The Fishing Gear Location Marking Fund is designed to encourage research and development of innovative commercial solutions that enable the location of fixed fishing gear on the sea floor (e.g., pot and trap gear) to be discovered by gear owners, other fishermen and fisheries, law enforcement, and fishery regulators without the use of buoy lines and buoys. Gear location technology is critical if fishing without buoy lines is to become a viable remedy to lethal entanglements of whales, sharks and turtles.
The Fund is dedicated to the development of interoperable solutions to gear location marking so that different manufacturers’ devices can communicate with one another. This means that fishermen setting their gear in close proximity to one another, yet marking their gear with different manufacturers’ products, will still be able to view the location of each other’s gear on their chart plotters. Recognizing that cost will be one of the most important factors affecting the adoption of buoyless fishing gear, interoperability will also promote healthy competition among manufacturers to keep the cost of buoyless fishing gear as low as possible.
The commitment of the Fund to interoperability means that no awards can be granted from the Fund until open standards and protocols for interoperable gear location marking are created and adopted by the appropriate federal agencies. Moreover, funds will only be awarded to companies that pledge to develop devices that conform to those open standards and protocols. The Fund anticipates that government agencies of the U.S. and Canada will ultimately certify gear location marking devices that conform to the adopted standards and protocols (as they do for Vessel Management System, or VMS, devices) to ensure that gear conflict is minimized, and our intention is to support the rapid development of devices that are designed to pass the government certification process.
The Fishing Gear Marking Fund is managed by the Island Foundation in collaboration with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and is made possible by our generous funding partners. The Fund pools contributions from multiple donors to provide sufficient resources for developers to design and fabricate prototypes to mark the location of fixed fishing gear.
We envision two phases of funding: (1) a design phase and (2) a prototype development, testing, and evaluation phase.
Phase 1
Proposals for the design phase will describe (1) the gear location technology intended for development, including (a) the method of geolocation, (b) the means of achieving interoperability with similar devices produced by other manufacturers, and (c) approaches to minimizing production and maintenance costs, (2) how gear location will be communicated to gear owners, other fishermen, law enforcement, and fishery regulators, (3) the organization’s experience in developing similar devices, and (4) plans to rapidly develop and commercialize the gear location technology.
Phase 2
Phase 2 proposals will be identical to the Phase 1 proposals with the addition of technical details describing the device design.
We will evaluate all proposals and determine awardees based on the following criteria: (1) capability of the proposed technology to provide gear location marking with low production and maintenance costs and interoperability with other manufacturers’ devices and (2) capacity of the organization to bring a gear location marking device to market quickly.