By Lindsay Key '11MFA

 

Text messaging and the use of social networking sites like Twitter are more than just ways for friends and family to keep in better touch.  These technologies are also impacting marine science data collection, and Wilmington based fisheries specialist Scott Baker is a leader in determining how.

 

Baker works for UNCW through the North Carolina Sea Grant program, which uses federal and state dollars to facilitate university-based research about North Carolina’s coastal ecosystems.  His most recent project explores whether text messaging is a good data collection approach during recreational fishing tournaments, specifically king mackerel tournaments.

 

The North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries estimates that king mackerel caught in saltwater tournaments represent 30-50 percent of the recreational catch for this species.  Comprehensive data is not collected during these events because of the logistical challenges in tournament sampling as well the inability to potentially survey all anglers after the tournament in a timely fashion.  Those anglers who are not successful are typically the most difficult to reach.  To manage this fishery, an accurate depiction of the tournament catch is needed. 

 

Thus, in a project expected to last through May 2010, Baker and his research team plan to demonstrate text messaging technology to anglers prior to king mackerel tournaments with assistance from tournament organizers and actual hands-on workshops with fishing clubs. 

           

Anglers will be asked to submit a single text message report detailing the days fishing activities (the number of anglers, hours fished, species kept and released along with length and weight) with species codes and numbers.  Once received, this message will be formatted and automatically entered into a standalone database for use by fisheries managers.  The angler will then receive a confirmation reply where a randomly determined number of anglers will be requested to volunteer for an interview prior to exiting the tournament. Comparisons between angler and weigh station derived measurements will be evaluated at the end of the tournament to determine the feasibility of using fishermen’s reports for scientific use.

           

The project is funded through the NC Marine Resources Fund, which is collected from the Coastal Recreational Fishing License fees.  It was developed in response to the success of a previous smaller study conducted in 2008, in which Baker and IBM computer scientist Ian Oeschger found that a group of charter captains could effectively use text messaging to report harvest information in real-time fashion. Read more about that study in the American Fisheries Society Online Journal.

          

The text messages were submitted to Twitter, which functions as a text messaging aggregating service and supplies a unique identification message to each text it receives, allowing the scientists to pull the data from Twitter into their own databases. 

           

“The global public is rapidly accepting mobile phones as an everyday communication tool – yet science has been relatively slow to embrace the enormity of this concept,” Baker says. “Text messaging is the most popular data application on the planet yet few applications outside of the marketing, business and social media sectors have capitalized on this opportunity. More accessible, cost effective and convenient that notebook computers and smartphones, standard mobile phones provide “citizen scientists” with access to not only a voice communication device – but as we have shown here - a portable, real-time reporting platform for standardized reporting of scientific data from the field.”

 

 

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Photo credit: Scott Baker