Editorial: Innovations in fishing technology aimed at achieving sustainable fishing

In the context of fisheries, “innovation” refers to the development and adoption of new ideas, technologies, practices, and approaches that lead to improvements in the sustainability, efficiency, and overall performance of the fishing industry. According to International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), innovation in fisheries is an improvement of the status quo, regardless of the improvement being incremental, transformative, or disruptive (WKING; ICES, 2020). Innovations in fisheries date back thousands of years, and used to be mostly driven by maximizing catch efficiency, led by an increasing understanding of habits and behaviours of the marketed species. In the modern era, the industrialization of fisheries in the 19th and 20th centuries brought technological innovations such as steam-engine vessels, onboard refrigeration, and freezing of catches, synthetic netting materials and information technologies to help communications, navigation, location of fish, and monitoring of gear performance while fishing (Squires and Vestergaard, 2013). These innovations led to the rise of substantially larger vessels and fishing gears, allowing exploitation of fish stocks in previously inaccessible ocean locations and depths and at substantially higher levels of productivity. Such unregulated technical progress contributed to the growth and development of fisheries, but also contributed to their overexploitation and concomitant environmental impacts. Therefore, driven by management requirements, and changing consumer preferences for “sustainable” seafood, recent innovation in fisheries turned toward promoting sustainable practices, reducing bycatch and minimizing environmental impacts