Kate Beard-Tisdale Leads Collaborative Project with Lobster Industry Team
An innovative new research project led by Kate Beard-Tisdale will explore the potential to use data owned by commercial lobstermen to map fishing effort. In this collaborative effort with Maine’s lobster industry, these data may be used to minimize conflict from potential future offshore wind development.
Beard-Tisdale will work closely with partners from the Maine Lobstermen’s Association and Responsible Offshore Development Alliance and its Fisheries Knowledge Trust, as well as the University of Maine’s Lobster Institute.
“Right now, published maps suggest that lobster fishing is occurring everywhere. We hope through this effort to provide more spatial specificity about the most important fishing locations — where fishermen spend more time and effort,” says Beard-Tisdale, UMaine professor of spatial computing in the School of Computing and Information Science. “This spatial specificity could result in protecting fishing areas or designating areas best avoided for wind turbine placement.”
UMaine and lobster industry team up on innovative collaboration to map Maine’s fishing effort