Global Fish Tracking System: Leveraging Destination Earth and Biologging Data for Climate Change Insights, Conservation, and Sustainable Use

The Global Fish Tracking System (GFTS) addresses critical challenges in conservation and sustainable resource management by modeling fish movements and migration patterns. It builds on the European Union's Destination Earth (DestinE) initiative, integrating biologging data to achieve these goals.

DestinE, a European Commission initiative, supports the Green Deal and Digital Strategy by creating high-resolution digital replicas of Earth systems. Its core components include:

• Digital Twins: Sophisticated Earth system models, such as the Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin.
• Data Lake: A centralized repository integrating diverse datasets for seamless cloud-based processing.
• DestinE Platform: A cloud infrastructure offering tools and services for data-driven decision-making.

GFTS exemplifies the application of DestinE by leveraging the Pangeo ecosystem to estimate fish movement using in situ biologging data. Key technologies supporting GFTS include Pangeo-fish, Jupyter, HEALPix, xDGGS, Xarray, and Zarr, combined with datasets from DestinE, Copernicus Marine Services, and biologging data stored in the European Tracking Networks (ETN) database. GFTS provides Decision support tools, enabling the evaluation of future environmental conditions for essential fish habitats derived from the Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin’s outputs. This combination offers new perspectives on analyzing essential fish habitats (migration swimways, spawning grounds) and it’s future environment.  These insights facilitate more effective conservation strategies, enhancing management practices, by reducing barriers for scientists and decision-makers to explore actionable data. 

By bridging scientific models and big data analytics, GFTS produces results that are both accessible and reproducible. The system’s objective is to foster sustainable resource use by equipping biologists and policymakers with advanced tools. This initiative highlights the pivotal role of cutting-edge numerical technologies in tackling cross-domain environmental data challenges, such as integrating ocean physics with fish ecology, to address conservation needs.