Partnering with the commercial fishing sector and Aotearoa New Zealand’s ocean community to develop a nationwide subsurface temperature monitoring program

Coastal regions of the world’s oceans are critical to supporting the fishing sector, recreation, tourism, and the global blue economy. However, there is a paucity of subsurface, in situ ocean measurements in coastal and shelf regions worldwide that corresponds to the region where a majority of commercial fishing occurs. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the Moana Project and technology partner ZebraTech, Ltd. have co-designed a fully automatic system that measures, transmits, processes, and disseminates temperature observations in near real-time with a goal of providing broad-scale coverage of New Zealand’s coastal and shelf seas. In the first two years, more than 300 sensors were deployed by over 250 vessels with the cooperation and support of the commercial fishing sector, providing more than one million temperature measurements per month throughout New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone. Participation by the fishing sector is critical to program success with continuous improvement based on fishing sector feedback. Here we introduce the fishing-vessel-based temperature and pressure data collection on a national scale and present initial results showcasing a step change in research quality ocean temperature data collection. Next, we highlight the full-circle data pathway including improved ocean forecasts and near real-time return of the data to the vessels that obtained them. Finally, a discussion of key partnerships, use cases, and lessons learned in Aotearoa New Zealand provides a potential framework for deploying similar systems in data-poor regions worldwide with the support of the commercial fishing fleet and citizen scientists.