


So far, the majority of users have shared locations, he said. But the team is hoping the desire to fight invasives will override the tendency to be secretive. Attby said the team was sensitive about anglers’ fear of disclosing too much information about good fishing spots, so made including details optional. Once an angler logs a catch, the data is captured by the app and relayed to wildlife officials.

“The key thing about this one is all about fish,” he said.įor the pilot project, the state chose 15 fish - including two types of tilapia, the bullseye snakehead, Rio Grande cichlid, some catfish and others - commonly caught by anglers to improve odds of getting information, Gestring said. Fish, Gestring said, don’t get much notice. For the public, the state created the IveGot1 app, but it’s dominated by reports about reptiles and mammals. The state now tries to track exotic species through its Early Detection & Distribution (EDD) maps, a tool well known to scientists but not generally to the public. It’s this last bit of information that Florida wildlife officials are after. Photo: Asian cichlid (courtesy of Miami Herald) A mapping feature provides an ongoing, and pretty accurate, depiction of where fish are caught.

Anglers can follow each other, follow types of fishing and kinds of fish and get local weather conditions. The app, which combines Facebook social networking with utility features, lets users post and comment on photos, log the locations of catches and search catches by species. “We’re willing to share with nonprofits if this can benefit sustainable fishing in general. “This is really core to Fishbrain,” Attby said. In 2015, the company launched a similar project tracking 50 at-risk and endangered species with the U.S. Because most anglers are also passionate about environmental issues, CEO Johan Attby said letting wildlife officials tap into the data to fight invasive species seemed like a natural fit. Web engineer Jens Persson created Fishbrain in 2011 to log details on his fishing exploits, then teamed up with a pair of internet entrepreneurs who say they now have 3 million users worldwide. Photo: Asian bullseye snakehead (courtesy of Miami Herald) “I was completely unaware of it,” he said. “These are thousands of citizen scientists helping us track where the fish are or letting us know about a new species,” said Kelly Gestring, a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission biologist who first learned about the app from a teenage angler at a high school talk. The state plans to use the app, and its 250,000 registered Florida users, to mine for data to better track 15 freshwater exotic fish. wildlife officials announced a new partnership with Fishbrain, a fishing app developed by a Swedish fisherman that lets fellow anglers share fishing conquests and prattle on endlessly about fly patterns and tidal fluctuations, without annoying all their friends.
SNAKEHEAD FISH FLORIDA SOFTWARE
Now there’s an app for thatįlorida is turning to an unlikely ally in the fight against invasive fish: Swedish software engineers.
