# Addressing Gaps in Small-Scale Fisheries: A Low-Cost Tracking System +
###### Abstract  
During the last decade vessel-position-recording devices, such as the Vessel Monitoring System and the Automatic Identification System, have increasingly given accurate spatial and quantitative information of industrial fisheries. On the other hand, small-scale fisheries (vessels below 12 m) remain untracked and largely unregulated even though they play an important socio-economic and cultural role in European waters and coastal communities and account for most of the total EU fishing fleet. The typically low-technological capacity of these small-scale fishing boats--for which space and power onboard are often limited--as well their reduced operative range encourage the development of efficient, low-cost, and low-burden tracking solutions. In this context, we designed a cost-effective and scalable prototypic architecture to gather and process positional data from small-scale vessels, making use of a LoRaWAN/cellular network. Data collected by our first installation are presented, as well as its preliminary processing. The emergence of a such low-cost and open-source technology coupled to artificial intelligence could open new opportunities for equipping small-scale vessels, collecting their trajectory data, and estimating their fishing effort (information which has historically not been present). It enables a new monitoring strategy that could effectively include small-scale fleets and support the design of new policies oriented to inform coastal resource and fisheries management. s 202  
of people employed/dependent on these fisheries [12]. SSF mainly involves the use of traditional passive gears to target multiple resource species [13; 14; 15] and operates in coastal areas, where many other users considerably compete for space and resources [16] and where sensitive and priority habitats for fisheries are located. The major concern over these fleets is, therefore, their impact on the ecosystem, such as bycatch and discards [17; 18; 19]. Knowledge of the sector is limited, and information on its fishing effort is sketchy both at national and European Union (EU) level, as VMS is mandatory for fishing vessels from 12 m in length overall and more and AIS from 15 m. Further, the contribution of SSF to fishing mortality of the exploited stocks is underestimated as only vessels above the length of 10 m are obliged to fill in logbooks. This regulatory situation partly explains the lack of SSF information, even though it remains a barrier to understanding the ecological pressures and impacts of small-scale fisheries and their effective management in many places [20]. Limitations in logbook information for the small-scale fleet, as well as in VMS or AIS broadcasts, results in scant possibilities for securing the compliance of the fisheries [21] and in the insufficient reliability of spatial fishing pressure indicators, which, at best, now rely on local approaches that include interviews [22], participatory mapping [23; 24], or modeling using generalized behavior rules such as distance from the shore and fishing depths [25; 26]. SSF usually cannot accommodate equipment such as VMS or AIS on board for a lack of space or power or simply because, in some cases, it would be too expensive. This encourages the development of alternative low-cost and low-burden tracking solutions. Only some national initiatives have been implemented in the EU to obtain fine-scale spatio-temporal data from small-scale fishing. They have used AIS, insbore VMS (iVMS; e.g., Marine Institute [27]), Electronic Monitoring (EM) sensors and/or video-based systems, the BlackBox (e.g., Danish Fisheries Agency, [28]), and GPS trackers (e.g., Department for Environment, Fisheries and Rural Affairs, 2018; Marine Scotland, 2019 [29]). Each initiative has revealed different advantages and challenges [21; 30]. Similarly, methods to deal with this new highly temporally resolved data have been proposed [31; 32], but they are still not harmonized and standardized.