Abstract Submission is open until July 1, 2026.

​Please read through the format of this year's meeting HERE.

The Ropeless Consortium Steering Committee is accepting abstracts for presentations at the 2026 Annual Meeting. We anticipate presentations will follow the same format as they have in the last couple of years - a mix of pre-recorded/pre-viewed presentations with some live presentations. Your participation type in the meeting does not preclude presentation - both remote and in person participants may submit abstracts for presentation.

The Ropeless Consortium Steering Committee is looking for presentations that fall into the following topics:

Management - We invite presentations from policy makers that describe efforts to craft regulations in their jurisdictions that will make on-demand fishing a legal remedy to fishery closures; presentations could focus on specific plans for drafting regulations, frameworks or roadmaps that are designed to facilitate future regulatory action, outstanding technical or legal issues that must be addressed before proceeding with regulations, governance issues, or other regulatory challenges.

Manufacturers - We are aiming to obtain updates on the following:

•  What mechanisms or approaches are you using to get gear into the hands of harvesters?
•  What sort of feedback have you gotten back from harvesters about ODG gear usage?
•  What capabilities have you been developing beyond catching the resource, for example, gear location marking, lost gear recovery, gear maintenance, other?
•  Have you seen efforts to improve implementation for particular fisheries?
•  What is the timescale to ramp up your project?

Market Incentives  - We invite presentations that address both the challenges and opportunities from the market perspective in advancing and incentivizing the commercialization of on-demand fisheries.

Technical Talks: Interoperability/Visualizing on demand gear/Gear Location Marking - We invite presentations that demonstrate and evaluate technical aspects of on-demand fishing, including but not limited to gear location marking, interoperability, visualizing gear locations at sea, enforcement access to deployed gear, locating lost gear, and estimating the accuracy of gear locations.

Ropeless Fishing - We invite presentations describing fishing (i.e. landing commercial product) that is being conducted with on-demand gear. We encourage submissions that have not been previously shown at the Ropeless Consortium, or that have had significant development since their previous presentations.

​Participants wishing to present at the 2026 Annual Meeting (in person or virtually) must submit an abstract for review no later than July 1st, 2026. Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words and should be formatted as shown HERE . Submission should be completed online. Please note that you will be asked to submit two abstracts - one without authors/affiliations and one fully formatted. Multiple participants from an organization may be asked to describe the significant differences in their work.

Please complete and submit the abstract submission form (see link above). Please be sure to indicate your topic preference on the submission form.

Presentations (both live and pre-recorded) will be assigned as speed talks (<5 minutes) or full talks (<10 minutes) during the review process.

Please see important information for presenters HERE.