HOW AI MONITORING COULD UNLOCK SUSTAINABLE FISHERIES: ALEXANDER DUNGATE FROM ONDECK FISHERIES AI
How do you monitor catch on fishing vessels out at sea? The traditional - and archaic - process for this is not exactly scalable. But one ocean impact startup may have found the ‘unlock’ for sustainable fisheries monitoring, by utilising AI.
For the fourth episode of our Pitchfest 2022 Series on the Ocean Impact Podcast, we chatted to OnDeck Fisheries AI Co-founder Alexander Dungate about how they’re “revolutionising fisheries management” with artificial intelligence.
OnDeck Fisheries AI is an early-stage startup that helps create sustainable fisheries, oceans, and communities by enabling scalable monitoring solutions that can be deployed around the world.
The Canadian-based ocean technology startup was Winner of the Sustainable Harvesting Award presented by Austral Fisheries as part of The Ocean Impact Pitchfest 2022.
Pictured: Austral Fisheries Inventory & Procurement Manager Camay Young presenting OnDeck Fisheries AI with the Sustainable Harvesting Spotlight Award at INNOVOCEAN.
Why fisheries monitoring? Alexander recounted one of his last classes during his Bachelor’s degree of Computer Science and Biology, focusing on fisheries science. His professor and guest lecturer Dr. Rashid Sumaila - a fisheries economist - introduced the problem with fisheries monitoring today, and how it’s a “rate limiting step” (the slowest step in a process, affecting how fast the whole process can be carried out) stopping the scalable and sustainable monitoring of fisheries.
”They introduced this like: hey this is a huge problem facing the world. okay next slide. And moved onto the next thing.
And I was thinking to myself: hold on. I think I could really make an improvement here. Make the world a better place”
Alexander stresses: he never wanted to be an entrepreneur.
Although he loves it now
But after learning a lot more about the problem, and attending hundreds of customer interviews with industry experts, it become clear the world needed a better solution. And the best way to make an impact in this space would be to a technology startup. So he brought in some of the brightest minds he knew, and OnDeck Fisheries AI was born.
What is fisheries monitoring?
When boats are out at sea, how do you monitor fishing activity like catch and bycatch, or make sure they’re following relevant rules, laws, and regulations?
When fisheries managers don’t know this information, their scope for interventions is limited. Lack of transparency in fishing activity can be a key enabler of overfishing and illegal fishing, and prevents the development of sustainable fisheries across the globe.
However, fisheries monitoring is notoriously difficult.
CURRENT fisheries monitoring solutions
One of the most-used solutions for fisheries monitoring is electronic monitoring, whereby a system of video cameras and sensors are installed on a vessel to monitor and record fishing activities, which can be reviewed later to verify what fishers report in their fishing logbooks.
There’s a significant issue with this solution though.
Most of the time, reviewing is done manually. By a human.
Why is that a problem?
There can be thousands of hours of footage! Someone manually counting fish, and auditing logbooks: it’s a archaic process.
In fact, according to Alexander Dungate:
the industry has problems retaining talent, and keeping video reviewers
the demand (hours upon hours of video footage) far outstrips the supply of people to review it
in Washington State in the US, they are one and half years behind on video review
Manual review is slow and expensive, and can be inaccessible in many countries around the world. And electronic monitoring systems are likely only on a small fraction of vessels, in certain jurisdictions, that are trying to do things by the book.
All of this means that it can’t be scaled up to a meaningful impact across the ocean.
OnDeck Fisheries AI was born out of a love for the ocean.
How is OnDeck Fisheries AI different?
OnDeck automates sustainable fisheries monitoring with artificial intelligence in a way that is both scalable and accessible to countries all around the world. Helping to reduce costs, increase monitoring, assist compliance requirements, and in the long-term reduce overfishing.
They believe that by welding together the worlds of artificial intelligence, fisheries science, and ocean economics they can create the future of ocean conservation.
startup Advice for emerging ocean innovators
OnDeck Fisheries AI Co-founders Matthew Leighton, Alexander Dungate, and Sepand Dyanatkar
When asked if he had any advice for budding youth oceanpreneurs or early-stage ocean impact startups, Alexander had some excellent points and also threw it back to our very own Tim Silverwood. They had a fantastic chat about the advice they'd each give to ocean innovators, here are some of our favourites from the episode.
youth innovators can change the world
“If you have an idea, be realistic about it, make sure you do some research first, make sure it's something people really need - but go for it! People will listen. A kid with an idea can change the world.” -Alexander
Know the truth of what you’re building
“Know the truth of what you're building. And you have to earn this knowledge, it's not easy to come by, you really have to put in the groundwork of talking to customers, loads of industry research, all this stuff. But if you know the truth of what you're building in terms of a real market need, and certainty in that yourself - and it's always changing, you have to keep working at it - but if you know this truth, you can communicate that with anybody. No matter the background; be it the business side, impact side, the skeptics. And I think this is really important.” -Alexander
Take feedback openly
“You have to be really good at taking feedback. People are going to just tear you apart. Maybe sometimes they don't understand the idea, or they just have questions. If you know the truth of what you're doing it becomes much easier to learn good lessons [from] any feedback. You have to be very resilient and constantly working on that core truth of what you're what you're building.” -Alexander
Stay Stoked
“We have this saying at OnDeck: Stay Stoked. Never lose the passion, and the excitement, and the energy behind what we're doing. Because we're ridiculously lucky to be able to come to work every day and save the world, and make the world a better place with innovative technology. It’s easy to take that for granted when it's so freaking hard starting a startup.” -Alexander
passion matters
“The first project I co-founded - Take 3 for the Sea - was one that was built on 110% percent passion and 0% strategy. We saw a problem and thought it would be a good idea to do something. And I think maybe deep down I knew that it could grow into something quite significant but it was never strategically intended to go and become what could be seen - I guess - as a global movement. That was just purely fuelled by my passion, and passion really can enable you to to rise above all else I think. I loved that adage around ‘find a job that you love and never work a day in your life’ - like it made all the really hard bits much easier, because I was just so satisfied with the impact.” -Tim
Stop and smell the roses
“Make sure that you do get a chance to receive and reward yourself with the positive impact that you're making. Like always have a moment to stop and do a little stocktake. You know, go to the ocean and feel that thanks. Because if you don't fill your cup then you're just going to burn out and wonder why on Earth you're doing it.” -Tim
Find a good co-founder
“With OIO, the really big thing for me was just finding a co-founder. We really nutted out the complexity of what we were creating and got really, really clear on the roles that each of us would undertake in order to build the thing. So we spent a huge amount of time - admittedly, we were both in work at the time whilst we were strategising - building a bit of a roadmap for how this thing could work. So that when we opened the doors, we didn't know exactly how we were going to do it, but we knew what we were doing. So co-founders: critically important.” - Tim
Find awesome advisors
“Surround yourself with incredible advisors, because you’ve got to know what you don't know the answer to. And know who is going to be your conduit to those really important industries and sub-ecosystems you want to be a part of. And OnDeck have done a really great job of surrounding yourself with some key advisors.” - Tim
Ocean impact entrepreneurs, startups, and upcoming innovators - take note!
OnDeck Fisheries AI uses artificial technology to streamline fisheries monitoring
Listen and Watch
New episodes of the Pitchfest 2022 Series will be releasing each week. Follow the Ocean Impact Podcast wherever you get your podcasts, or subscribe and watch on Youtube.
