Progress Meeting of the "Improving Fisheries Monitoring through Integrating Passive and Active Satellite-based Technologies" (IMPAST) project

Brussels, 5 July 2002

The first progress meeting of the Improving fisheries monitoring through integrating passive and active satellite-based technologies (IMPAST) project, co-ordinated by the JRC Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC), was held today in Reykjavik.

The three-year project started on 1 January 2002 under the FP5 Quality of Life programme and is being run in conjunction with the Fisheries DG. It is involved with developing, improving and assessing methodologies and tools to allow near-real time access to space borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite imagery.

The integration of and comparison of this information with vessel monitoring system (VMS) position reports will improve and support fishery control activities. The project is being integrated with another IPSC project, New technologies for monitoring fishing vessels, which complements its aims and objectives.

Through these projects, efforts will be made to set up a network of research organisations with expertise in image processing, to focus on the deployment of new space-borne sensors for vessel monitoring. A similarly themed IPSC project, Monitoring illicit discharges, aims to generate reliable spatio-temporal statistics of oil discharges from ships in European seas using remote sensing techniques and methodologies. This will, in turn, give updated information on the extent to which international environmental law is being transgressed and allow the effectiveness of existing policies to be assessed.

Contact: iain.shepherd@jrc.it

Url: http://intelligence.jrc.cec.eu.int/fish /IMPAST/IMPAST_index.html

Joint Research Centre
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