
Apparent fishing events (AIS)
The agreement will harness technology and transparency to strengthen surveillance of marine protected areas and safeguard biodiversity

The agreement will harness technology and transparency to strengthen surveillance of marine protected areas and safeguard biodiversity

Access to AIS vessel presence data is now available through the 4Wings API.

At Global Fishing Watch, we hear it all the time: “Tracking commercial fishing vessels from satellites is such a great idea, and it seems so easy!” In fact, we’ve received a few questions from our readers asking us why this isn’t just a simple hack of publicly available data.
Along with the recent release of our fishing effort data, we are also releasing information on how good AIS coverage is for different parts of the world. That is, in some parts of the ocean, an AIS signal sent by a vessel is very likely to be in our database, and in others, it is less likely […]
To view different types of fishing vessel data, on the top of the left sidebar, we have the Activity section. The ‘apparent fishing effort’ includes AIS and VMS data. AIS data can be filtered by flag and gear type. VMS data can be filtered by source, flag and, in some cases, by gear type, fleet […]

Automatic Identification System (AIS) messages are transmitted over radio waves. The system was designed, in part, so that vessels could “see” the positions of nearby ships on a monitor and avoid collisions. These radio signals are received by satellites and used for many monitoring purposes. Each boat can broadcast a distinct message as often as every two […]

Errors in fishing effort and fishing event data have been fully resolved.

The ocean is one of the world’s most important shared resources, yet for decades, activities at sea occurred out of sight, making it difficult to manage marine resources and combat illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.

We've detected an issue with how automatic identification system (AIS) encounter events are generated.

Events and vessel detections may show in our platform, but tracks are missing.