OPEN ARTFISH stands for Open Approaches, Rules and Techniques for Fisheries statistical monitoring. It consists of the OPEN ARTFISH software application and its backbone OPEN ARTFISH database. The software application is built to estimate the total catch and value by species for sampling schemes of small-scale fisheries. Other major outputs of the OPEN ARTFISH are guidelines, manuals, training course and material.
There are several existing methods of statistical fisheries data collection. However, because fisheries are dominated by large and dispersed small-scale fleet, data have to be collected through sample-based surveys. Estimates of annual catches therefore depend heavily on samples of catches and fishing effort from fish landings. However, any sampling design must be achieved at the lowest possible cost; this means that any sampling scheme must be designed to minimize sampling error for a given cost. For this purpose, OPEN ARTFISH was designed as a standardized tool that can be customized to fisheries in developing countries to deliver a cost-effective and sustainable routine for collection, storage and analysis of data. It is based on the appropriate statistical procedures and sampling design, as described thoroughly by Stamatopoulos (2002) and de Graaf et al. (2014).
OPEN ARTFISH replaces ARTFISH, which FAO made available in 1993. The old version of ARTFISH is not compatible with Windows 7 or higher version. OPEN ARTFISH is "Open" because it can be easily adapted to local requirements and more specific outputs/reports can easily be added while maintaining the appropriate statistical procedures.