Inland fisheries, which provide food, employment, and recreation for communities around the world, have notoriously limited data. This data tends to be non-standardized, isolated, inconsistent across water basins, and sometimes, entirely lacking. As environmental conditions continue to shift, building reliable, comparable data standards is key to strengthening climate resilience in inland fisheries. 

A new National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) working group recently gathered to begin building a common language for these data. The group, called GO FISH (Guidelines On core data for climate-resilient inland FISHeries), consists of an interdisciplinary team of experts, including representatives from the National CASC. The team began exploring using artificial intelligence to make sense of the expansive environmental datasets, by integrating information from satellites, fisher organizations, and fishery managers across major river basins. Combing AI with human expertise can help the researchers to identify patterns, detect redundancies, and prioritize useful information for managers. By developing shared data standards, the team hopes that inland fisheries data will be easier to integrate, analyze, and apply to future conservation and management. 

Learn more about the outcomes of the GO FISH working group in this article by NCEAS Communications, Using AI to GO FISH: Strengthing Climate-Resilient Inland Fisheries.   

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