International - Untangling the origin and movement of ghost nets in the Indian Ocean to aid management and mitigation

现代渔网经久耐用。与其他海洋塑料污染不同的是，渔网的设计也是为了诱捕海洋生物。当丢失或丢弃这些耐用的尼龙、聚丙烯或聚乙烯网时，它们可以完好无损地漂浮几十年。因此，他们继续“幽灵捕捞”宝贵的鱼类资源，并破坏重要的沿海资源，如珊瑚礁，这对维持手工渔业和依赖旅游业的社区至关重要。现在人们熟悉的景象是，丢失或丢弃的渔网与腐烂的海龟、鱼类、海鸟和其他生物纠缠在一起，证明了这种海洋污染的致命性质。人们很少认识到这些“鬼网”对发展中沿海国家的粮食安全和可持续经济发展构成的威胁。2015年，全球幽灵渔具倡议（GGGI）启动，这是一个由来自渔业、私营部门、非政府组织、政府和政府间组织的利益相关者组成的跨部门联盟，旨在在联合国海洋垃圾全球伙伴关系框架内推动解决全球范围内丢失和遗弃渔具问题的解决方案。GGGI有三个战略方针：建立证据，确定最佳做法，为政策提供信息，并促进缓解解决方案。在印度洋，主要的当地非政府组织利益相关者是Olive Ridley Project (ORP; http://oliveridleyproject.org/)，其首席执行官是GGGI“建立证据”工作组的前任主席。我们的创新项目“解开印度洋幽灵渔网的起源和移动，以帮助管理和缓解”是与ORP和GGGI共同开发的。马尔代夫特别容易受到这类海洋垃圾的影响。2013-2017年期间，马尔代夫ORP公民科学志愿者回收了700多张网和其他渔具。这些数字仅仅是这片广袤偏远地区的冰山一角。马尔代夫渔业并未正式使用渔网，这表明当地的环境危机来自遥远的印度洋，跨越了国际边界和海龟迁徙通道。显然，问题需要从源头着手解决，但这很难确定；印度洋有许多低收入国家，是国际商业捕鱼以及非法和未报告捕鱼活动极为活跃的区域。需要证据来确定哪个区域的渔场对幽灵渔具负责。如果能展示幽灵渔网随洋流飘洋过海的过程，以及它们的聚集区域，对减缓和保护工作都将是非常宝贵的。在这个项目中，我们建议将布里斯托尔大学开发的最先进的海洋扩散建模和可视化工具结合起来，使用英国最快、最先进的超级计算设备之一，并结合ORP在泰国、巴基斯坦、印度、阿曼和马尔代夫开展的公民科学项目中回收的鬼网数据，以追溯它们在印度洋内的可能来源。我们将修改我们的建模能力，最初开发是为了确定珊瑚幼虫从一个珊瑚礁到另一个跨越数千英里的路径，应用这个强大的工具来模拟渔网的海洋运输。在NERC ERIIP资助的项目中开发的可视化工具，用于绘制水母大量繁殖被运送到沿海发电厂的可能性，将在这里进行翻译，以传达来自特定区域规模渔场的幽灵渔具搁浅在马尔代夫和其他问题地区的统计可能性。我们合作的结果是，ORP将根据强有力的科学证据，在负责任的部门和地区开展战略性的教育和推广工作，GGGI也将利用这些证据来支持跨界决策和政策变革行动。

Modern fishing nets are made to last. In contrast to other plastic marine pollution, fishing nets are also explicitly designed to entrap marine life. When lost or discarded these durable nylon, polypropylene or polyethylene nets remain intact and afloat for decades. Consequently, they continue to 'ghost fish' valuable fish stocks and damage critical coastal resources like coral reefs essential for sustaining artisanal fisheries and tourism-dependent communities. The now familiar image of lost or discarded fishing nets entangled with decomposing turtles, fish, seabirds and other creatures, attest to the deadly nature of this marine pollution. Less well recognised is the threat these 'ghost nets' pose to the food security and sustainable economic development of developing coastal nations. In 2015 the Global Ghost Gear Initiative (GGGI), a cross-sectorial alliance of stakeholders from the fishing industry, the private sector, NGOs, governments and intergovenmental organisations was launched to drive solutions to the problem of lost and abandoned fishing gear worldwide within the UN Global Partnership on Marine Litter. The GGGI has three strategic approaches; build evidence, define best practices and inform policies, and catalyse mitigation solutions. For the Indian Ocean the major local NGO stakeholder is the Olive Ridley Project (ORP; http://oliveridleyproject.org/), the CEO of which is a previous chair of the GGGI 'Build Evidence' Working Group. Our Innovation Project "Untangling the origin and movement of ghost nets in the Indian Ocean to aid management and mitigation" has been co-developed with both ORP and GGGI.The Maldives are particularly vulnerable to this type of marine debris. Over 700 conglomerates of multiple individual nets and other fishing gear were recovered by Maldivian ORP citizen science volunteers between 2013-2017. These numbers represent only the tip of the iceberg in this vast remote region. Nets are not officially used in Maldivian fisheries, indicating that this local environmental crisis has come from far afield in the Indian Ocean, crossing international borders and turtle migration pathways. Clearly the problem needs addressing at the point of origin, but this is very difficult to pinpoint; the Indian Ocean contains a large number of low-income countries and is an extremely active region for international commercial fishing, as well as illegal and unreported fishing activities. Evidence is required to identify which regional fishing grounds are responsible for the ghost gear. It would also be invaluable for both mitigation and conservation efforts to demonstrate the journey ghost nets take, and areas of accumulation, as they drift across the ocean with the currents. In this project we propose to combine state-of-the-art ocean dispersal modelling and visualisation tools developed at Bristol University using one of the fastest and most advance supercomputing facilities in the UK, with data on recovered ghost nets from citizen science projects run by ORP in Thailand, Pakistan, India, Oman and the Maldives to backtrack their likely source within the Indian Ocean. We will modify our modelling capabilities, originally developed to identify the pathways coral larvae take from one reef to another across thousands of miles, applying this powerful tool to instead simulate the oceanic transport of nets. Visualisation tools developed during a NERC ERIIP funded project to map the probability of jellyfish blooms being transported to coastal power plants will be translated here to communicate the statistical likelihood of ghost gear originating from specific regional-scale fishing grounds stranding in the Maldives and other problem areas. The outcome of our collaboration will be strategic targeting of education and outreach efforts at the responsible sector and region by the ORP based on strong scientific evidence that will also be used by the GGGI to support transboundary decision-making and policy change actions.