WCS Working With Technology

For the past 2 days, we've been telling you all about the how the Wildlife Conservation Society and other local conservation groups have been putting technology to use in their efforts to police Belize's marine and terrestrial protected areas. 

That includes the SMART system, which is short for Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tools. This system allows the conservationists to track illegal fishing activities, and incursions into marine protected areas. 

Well tonight, we have one more system of theirs to tell you about. It's their satellite vessel monitoring system, which - if it is embraced by Belize's fisherfolk - will allow them to track the movement of all fishing vessels in Belizean waters using GPS. The country director told us on Wednesday that this VMS system will allow the Wildlife Conservation Society to rescue fishermen who are lost at sea:

Nicole Auil Gomez, Country Director - WCS
"We also passed by the vessels that is being tested for tracking - the fishing vessel. So we passed by a fishing sailboat that has the solar satellite based via my system attached to it, to show that we can find it when we need to. This is really something that the fishermen appreciate because it helps to provide an SOS if they are in need and we've tested it a couple times that we've had this particular fisher press the SOS and the response time to find them and intercept the vessel was about an hour and a half. So within a fairly short period of time from the alert to encountering the vessel out at sea and that's mobilizing the necessary vessel and with the fisheries department that was made possible."

As you heard, it is in its trial phase right now, and that one vessel you saw in our story is the only boat that is currently equipped with VMS as a pilot test.

Channel 7