Ongjin-gun County (Governor Jang Jung-min) in Incheon has brought cutting-edge unmanned aerial technology to the management of its village fishing grounds. The county announced that on July 6 it had completed its ‘fishery-management drone support project,’ which has been pursued to systematically monitor the fisheries resources of village fishing grounds within its jurisdiction and to prevent safety accidents involving non-fishers who enter the tidal flats. The initiative is an attempt to fill the long-standing gaps in monitoring at fishing communities and the blind spots in coastal safety with unmanned aerial equipment, and it marks the first case of the ‘smart fishing-ground management’ that Ongjin-gun has championed.
 [The Korean Today] Fishery-management drone introduced by Ongjin-gun © Reporter Kim Mi-hee |
This project was carried out as a city-subsidized program jointly funded by Incheon Metropolitan City and Ongjin-gun. The project targeted two fishing village cooperatives in Yeongheung-myeon — the Naeri and Seonjae cooperatives — and the county supported the cost of introducing a total of three drones: two for the Naeri cooperative and one for the Seonjae cooperative. For fishing village cooperatives that must guard extensive tidal flats and village fishing grounds with a small workforce, this means securing equipment that can greatly enhance their monitoring capacity.
The introduced aircraft are equipped with advanced gear such as nighttime thermal-imaging cameras and on-site voice-relay functions. Thanks to these, illegal harvesting of fisheries resources in village fishing grounds can now be monitored from the sky, day or night. With the scope of management extended to wide fishing grounds and dark hours that are hard for the human eye to reach, the county expects the drones to become a practical means of protecting the resources that the fishing village cooperatives have cultivated together.
The drones’ uses are not limited to resource monitoring. Amid a recent rise in coastal safety accidents, such as people being stranded on tidal flats, the cooperatives can deploy the drones to assist when an accident occurs. The approach is to quickly assess the scene and use the on-site voice-relay function to broadcast guidance and prompt evacuation. This creates a structure in which the safety of ordinary visitors, not just fishers, can be immediately looked after right at the fishing site.
 [The Korean Today] Fishery-management drone of a Yeongheung-myeon fishing village cooperative © Reporter Kim Mi-hee |
The preliminary administrative procedures for safe and stable operation were also completed without a hitch. The Naeri and Seonjae cooperatives promptly carried out the necessary procedures, and Ongjin-gun supported this with administrative guidance and cooperation tailored to the field. Registration of the roughly 1.2-kg aircraft as ultralight flying devices and approval procedures for both daytime and nighttime flight have all been completed, and all of the cooperatives’ drone operators have obtained the pilot license (Class 4) administered by the Korea Transportation Safety Authority, completing their preparations to be deployed to the field immediately.
An Ongjin-gun official said, “Thanks to this city-subsidized project carried out through close cooperation with Incheon City, we were able to build the advanced smart fishing-ground management system needed at fishing sites in a timely manner,” adding, “While using drones to manage village fishing grounds and protect fisheries resources, we will continue to actively realize various advanced projects to raise fishers’ incomes and create a sustainable aquaculture environment going forward.”
The introduction of drones is expected to be more than mere equipment support — it is likely to become a turning point that changes how resource management and safety response are handled at fishing sites long plagued by labor shortages. Attention is turning to whether this project, which unites the two tasks of monitoring and safety in a single piece of equipment, will spread to other fishing village cooperatives.
[ Reporter Kim Mi-hee: incheonsouth@thekoreantoday.com ]
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