Satellite monitoring of fishing vessels and development of a GIS based coastal information system

Agriculture and fisheries constitutes one of the legislation adaptation titles of Turkey, which is in the European Union membership process. The aim of the subtitle of fisheries is to form a national policy in macro level and to match this policy with the European Union Common Fisheries Policy. Answering this aim and realizing a sustainable management in the fisheries sector can be possible through forming a monitoring and information systems including the fisheries products sector.In this study, the management condition of the fisheries sector in the European Union Coastal States has been investigated with numerical data and the differences have been discussed by comparing it with the conditions in Turkey. Satellite based vessel monitoring technologies (vessel monitoring and detection systems), system software and hardware, their structural elements, available samples and ways of usages have been researched, advantageous and disadvantageous aspects of the systems and their separate and joint usages have been evaluated.Fishing harbors and lighthouse information systems, formed for Turkish coasts, have been developed as a coastal information system in a structure that can serve jointly. A prototype system, representing the vessel monitoring system, has been developed, and by using a common coastal line map which provides an integrated view through the above mentioned information systems, monitoring activities have been tried to be visualized. The working of the system has been tested by using synthetic data. The new system that has been developed can be shown as a geographical information system based multi-layered coastal information system equipped with the vessel monitoring system.