Digital Fish-Science Boards Introduced

Digital Fish-Science Boards from Big Fin Scientific decrease fish-sampling costs and increase sampling accuracy and repeatability.

Big Fin Scientific, an Austin, Texas-based creator of marine-ready digital equipment for fish research and monitoring, has launched a new line of Digital Fish-Science Boards for fish researchers, fisheries management and observers to capture fish-sampling data digitally, replacing the overhead and errors inherent to pencil and paper. The Fish-Boards are accurate and repeatable, so research processes can be created and relied-upon for decades, no matter the operator of the boards, the developer said.

Big Fin DFS/2 Fish-Boards capture fish-data such as length, measurement type (fork, total or standard, or collect all three), species, weight, sex, size-class, station, location, voyage information, ship information, GPS data, defects, pregnancy status and general comments, among others. The boards store many thousands of fish-records during the survey or sampling work, which are then transferred to a computer for analysis.

The boards come in a variety of lengths to meet any need: 20cm, 50cm, 85cm and 1m (measuring lengths). The boards offer 10-hour minimum battery runtime and are waterproof and made to withstand a marine environment, including submersion. The DFS/2 Fish-Boards work in conjunction with a customizable Android tablet application.

Pictures and videos of the boards in action ara available at www.bigfinscientific.com.