THE PROJECT

SUSTUNTECH offers a compact and cost-effective system to improve the energy efficiency of tuna fishing vessels by at least a 25% compared to current practices. Advanced vessel monitoring, Copernicus data and machine learning will be combined to propose strategies to improve the detection of fish distribution, reduce time at sea, save fuel and better route planning. This will fill the current need to reduce emissions of all human activities without reducing production as demanded by the Paris Agreement.

SUSTUNTECH offers the integration and further development of existing technologies into existing commercial and pre-commercial products that can later be applied to other types of fishing vessels or even other shipping industries. This will contribute to the economic sustainability in fishing industry and increase in revenue for the products developers and research institution to continue their research and innovation activities after the project.

SUSTUNTECH will contribute to improve Copernicus (the European system for monitoring the Earth) data. and services by using two fishing vessels as platforms to capture oceanographic data at least for one full year.

Improving fisheries sustainability

The project will enhance the fishing industry profit as well as contributing to fisheries sustainablity.

SusTunTech main objective is to reduce fishing emissions to contribute to the environmental and economic sustainability of the industry. However, the project also contributes to other aspects of fisheries sustainability:

First of all, the project contributes to stock assessment for the provision of management by improving data provision, its quality, and estimation of indexes.
In order to avoid incidental fishing, we are using machine learning technologies to avoid areas with high presence of by-catch species.
Last but not least, we not only reduce reduce pollution by using modelling to reduce fuel consumption, but also with strategies to reduce FAD beaching episodes.