TropicBird
Client: Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) https://www.wcpfc.int/
The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) was established by the Convention for the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stocks in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean (WCPF Convention) which entered into force on 19 June 2004. The WCPFC Convention seeks to address problems in the management of high seas fisheries resulting from unregulated fishing, over-capitalization, excessive fleet capacity, vessel re-flagging to escape controls and insufficient multilateral cooperation in respect to conservation and management of highly migratory fish stocks.
In the pursuit of the work of the Commission and its subsidiary bodies, the Commission’s Secretariat receives and disseminates information from members, vessel operators, and all key stakeholders, which is maintained in its operational Information Management System (IMS). Data is also received from external databases and all are integrated into its TropicBird Data Warehouse (DWH) facility. TropicBird has enabled the Secretariat to provide timely and accurate analysis and reporting to the Commission on the status of the tuna fishery and the performance of different members according to the conservation and management measures (CMMs) agreed by all members.
While the Secretariat concentrates on their data analysis and reporting, the majority of the data preparation and crunching work is done at a lower, more technical level. TropicBird DWH uses the AMS application for the extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) of all datasets into an enterprise SQL Server database management system (with business intelligence capabilities). TropicBird is more than 30 months old now, and it currently includes information on more than 11,000 fishing vessels, transshipment activities, catch discards, VMS daily positions and tracking devices on more than 4,000 vessels, activities in special management areas, high seas boarding and inspections, etc.
The AMS is a central facility in the design and operations of TropicBird. The standard procedures require monthly updates of all data sets and there are checks and balances to maximize the accuracy of the data. But the DWH updates using AMS can be run as needed, even more than once a day. In this way, the routine monthly runs provide Secretariat staff with good understanding of how accurate and up-to-date the data is. At the same time, when requested, the AMS can update the TropicBird DWH to include all the latest datasets for analysis and reporting to support the Commission’s work.
TropicBird is mainly supported by one ICT staff at the Secretariat, with escalated support to its developers including AMS designers. It requires minimal technical knowledge by the Commission staff to make sure it continues to run and support the Secretariat team. The AMS application has a proven track record of more than 30 months continuous operation in WCPFC, and has excellent developers and professionals who support it.
Sam Taufao
ICT Manager
(March 2016)
Update, May 2021: TropicBird DWH continues to be a key facility for the WCPFC and has grown siginificantly since first introduced, both in the scope and volume of the data that it manages. Further, AMS now provides additional capabilities, such as unattended daily loads of the data warehouse with automated alerts to IT staff in case of any unsuccessful completion.