About - Insight 360

COMBINING FISHING EXPERIENCE & CUTTING-EDGE TECH

Insight360 is an innovative and cost-effective tool being developed with the fishing industry, in order to improve our understanding of marine wildlife bycatch, particularly dolphin and porpoise bycatch, in fisheries.

Combining hard-earned fishing experience with cutting-edge machine learning, the technology brings the insights of the fishing industry into the realm of electronic monitoring – transforming how bycatch events are documented aboard fishing vessels.

CONTINUOUSLY REFINED WITH COMMERCIAL FISHERMEN

Engineered, tested and continuously refined with direct input from commercial fishermen, the Insight360 tool allows you to record interactions with non-target marine life in a way that fits the practicalities of being at sea and working aboard a fishing vessel.

Unlike existing monitoring solutions, Insight360 removes the need to manually review and add notes to footage, offering instead a way for skippers and crews to train a monitoring system to automatically recognise and record bycatch events as they happen, hands-free.

WHY BYCATCH?

The complex marine environment in which fishing takes place means that ‘non-target’ marine wildlife, including cetacean species like dolphins and porpoises, are sometimes accidentally caught in fishing nets as bycatch.

Difficult to avoid, bycatch is distressing and damaging for both animals and humans, including those working on board fishing vessels. Animals that do survive unintended capture may be badly injured. For those on board, releasing the animal can be both upsetting and dangerous; and the resulting damage to fishing gear costly.

Learning more about where and why bycatch happens can help address this, by preventing it from happening in the first place. Fishers should have an easy way to record their responsible fisheries and rare cetacean bycatch events. This is where Insight360 comes in.

SHAPED BY THE VOICES OF THE FISHING INDUSTRY

Created by a unique collaboration of fishermen, scientists, engineers, conservationists, and communicators; Insight360 is a powerful, yet lightweight and cost-effective tool designed to help fishers monitor bycatch in their fisheries, in a way that works – both for those at sea, and on land.

Engineered with direct input from, and specifically shaped by, the voices of the fishing industry, the Insight360 tool has been developed and refined with commercial fishers working off the South West of England.

TAILORED TO THE REALITIES OF BEING AT SEA

Involved in the Insight360 story from the start, collaboration with fishers means Insight360 has been specifically tailored to fit the realities of working aboard a fishing vessel.

From installation and functionality to the bespoke needs of different fisheries, based on their insight and ongoing feedback Insight360’s Alpha model, which was initially installed on three vessels, has been developed to a Beta system and is currently undergoing sea trials aboard five commercial vessels off the South West coast of England.