The societal need for sustainable exploitation of aquatic resources, requires support to monitoring need to ensure sustainable fishing, increasingly resorting to aquaculture, and a tighter control on fishing activities provides an opportunity for commercial EO services in this area.
Based on Copernicus and GEOSS data and resources, it is now possible to implement commercially-oriented services for:
1) fishing authorities wishing to have an improved control over marine resources;
2) responsible fishing companies willing to certify their compliance to sustainability by ecolabeling fish provenance;
3) the fast growing aquaculture industry assessing their risks and potential revenues;
4) aquaculture regulators in understanding the impact of fish farms, in order to decide based on bespoke scientific solutions.
NextOcean is proposed by a consortium of companies, research institutions, a business school and a buyers group supporting the development of innovative services. It targets fishing and aquaculture by proposing EO commercial services for the public and private sectors. It builds on past activities, proposing an integrated solution.