Themes of Past Sympoisa

At each Symposium, there has been a single theme in order to highlight and strengthen that area of fishery GIS. “GIS software” was the major theme of the First Symposium in 1999. GIS was becoming an essential tool for spatial analysis of fisheries data and various GIS software programs were either being developed or adapted for these analyses. The First Symposium provided a forum to showcase these GIS software applications.

Following the First Symposium, we observed the development of basic quantitative spatial analyses using GIS; however, quantitative GIS applications and linkages to stock assessment, resources management, population estimation, geostatistics, forecasting, contour estimation, etc., were not well established or developed. Thus, the theme at the Second Symposium in 2002 was “Spatial Numerical Analyses”.

Three themes were established for the Third Symposium in 2005. The first was “Effective and Affordable GIS for Fishery and Aquatic Information,” especially for the developing countries. Our intention was to encourage participation by people from developing countries and to demonstrate how GIS could be used by those in these countries.

The second theme was “Spatial Fish Stock Assessment Modeling.” At the First Symposium there were several papers on GIS (space) based production models and VPAs under development, which were exciting topics. Indeed there have been many geostatistics-related papers in the past Symposia.

The third theme was “Spatial Fisheries Resource Management.” Fisheries managers, not only in the developed countries but also in the developing countries, are gradually adopting GIS-based systems, along with GPS, VMS, satellites, electronic log books, etc., and integrating these into their organizations to manage fisheries resources. As a result this topic was extremely useful for government officials, engineers, GIS system developers, and scientists to help them learn about and exchange information on recent developments and technologies.