The Nature Conservancy

This is a comprehensive system for use in processing plants. TNC piloted the Smart Weighing Measuring System (SWMS) in Indonesia, in partnership with Indotropic (a seafood processing company) and an IT company that helped develop the components. Fish that are brought to the processing plant are first sorted by type, sometimes with the assistance of software like FishFace, and barcoded. Then the fish are weighed and passed onto a measuring board where fish length is quickly quantified. A new barcode is printed that combines weight, measurement, species, and GPS tracking information which is integrated into a database. These barcodes then follow fish through packaging and to the buyer, creating an extremely detailed profile for the catch. SWMS requires a touchscreen computer, a barcode printer and scanner, digital scale, and a measuring board. If full retention of the catch can be ensured (especially with respect to discarding fish in certain length categories that may be of lower value or sold to other buyers prior to landing at the processing plant) this system may provide a way to check compliance with size limits and estimate length-frequency composition which can be used to compute fishing mortality and spawning potential ratio, important indicators of overfishing.