The project’s name is a give-away: it’s facial recognition technology for fish.

Not their faces, exactly, but their species. The funding will allow the organisation to keep developing visual matching software to help digital cameras recognise fish as they’re caught on commercial vessels, and the volumes in which they are hauled on board.

In doing so, it may give Australia’s federal fishing regulator — and all its counterparts around the region— the tools they need to solve a potentially huge problem.

“The world is running out of fish. Global peak fish catch occurred in the 1980s and the global catch has been declining ever since. In fact, 64 percent of fisheries are now overfished and 90 percent of all fisheries have no effective management in place," TNC says on its website.