Enhancing Fisheries Management in with OLSPS Commercial Fishing Electronic Logbook Solutions Amos Barkai OLSPS

Most of the world's commercial fish stocks are heavily depleted and an estimated 70\% of fish populations are biologically and economically vulnerable and depleted to well below their Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) due to sustained overfishing. In addition, large proportion of the commercial fisheries are mixed species fishing operations. These fisheries tend to target a few economically important species. However, due to the indiscriminate nature of many fishing methods there is a wide variety of bycatch species that are captured and either discarded or landed. In some fisheries there is a limit on the amount of bycatch that can be landed (chock species) and once this limit is reached fishing must stop altogether even if the legal quota of the target species wasn't yet reached. Bycatch of commercial fisheries worldwide is of great concern to fisheries’ managers, scientists, and environmental and conservation groups. Bycatch contributes to changing the structure of marine communities and ecosystems, leading to significant implications for marine populations and the overall health and sustainability of the marine ecosystems. As a result, the total impact of fishing on marine ecosystems may far exceed what can be estimated and assumed by only looking and monitoring the landed catch of commercial species. One should add to this, documented cases where other marine life are killed and sensitive ecosystems are destroyed due to rampant fishing even (maybe mainly) by legally operating fishing vessels and the public and scientific concerns regarding the adverse impact of commercial fishing on the marine ecosystem as whole is probably well founded.