On a California Collaborative Fisheries Research Program (CCFRP) survey, volunteer anglers do the fishing, but every fish they land goes to a trained scientist on deck. The scientist identifies it, measures it on a board, checks its health, tags it, and sends it back. It’s great data, but it only scales as far as you can put scientists on boats.
There are an estimated 118 million recreational anglers across North America, Europe, and Oceania, and plenty of them carry a phone with a LiDAR sensor. FishSense Mobile is our iOS app that uses that sensor, along with the camera, to measure a fish’s fork length from a photo, with no measuring board or reference object in the frame. Everything runs on the device, so it works offshore with no signal and can tell you on the spot if you need to retake the photo. In the lab and on CCFRP catch-and-release surveys, it came within ±2 cm, on average, of the scientists’ length board measurements.
I’ll be presenting the paper at OCEANS 2025 Great Lakes at Navy Pier in Chicago on Wednesday, October 1, at 4:30 PM Central, in the Fisheries and Aquatic Invasive Species session (Room 311-312). The paper is here.
This one had a big team behind it: Nykolas Rekasius, Anu Jajodia, Theodore Darci-Maher, Sijan Shrestha, Aayushka Budhathoki, Annabelle Chen, Brendon Mwamba, Zach Merson, Shawn Doyle, Grace Turner, Jakob Tallman, Cole Wilson, Jack Elstner, Brice X. Semmens, Curt Schurgers, and Ryan Kastner, plus the CCFRP scientists and anglers who let us test on their boats.