The no-take marine reserve Motu Maha surrounds the Aukland Islands. Marine protected areas (MPAs) are among the best tools we have for conserving biodiversity in the oceans, protecting vulnerable marine life, and providing places of refuge for fish stocks. But do they work? Can vast areas of ocean really be regulated? And if so, what […]
Imagine a vessel captain pulling into port with a cargo hold full of fish. The captain reports the vessel’s identity to the authorities, and his or her entire fishing voyage can be instantly viewed on a screen. The location in which the fish was caught can be verified right there at the dock. The fish […]
Once considered to be a cold, dark desert nearly devoid of life, the deep sea is now known to support more species of marine life than the shallow reefs of the tropics. A menagerie of corals, sponges and undiscovered creatures—some of them previously unimaginable, others known only from the fossil record, lies hidden in near complete darkness […]
It’s been just over five months since Global Fishing Watch launched publicly, and this week, we hope to make another splash by not just mapping global fishing activity, but by providing an unprecedented view of very specific activity by a very specific class of vessels around the world. Today, at the Economist World Ocean Summit […]
Occasionally, the AIS messages transmitted from a ship provide a location that makes no sense, say, in the middle of the Antarctic or over a mountain range. In such cases, either the AIS transponder has malfunctioned, the data got scrambled in transmission, or the system has been tampered with in a deliberate attempt to disguise […]
Nuno Queiroz and a team of over 150 scientists recently published “Global spatial risk assessment of sharks under the footprint of fisheries” in the journal Nature. Tim White, Global Fishing Watch Fisheries Scientist, was a co-author of this study. Sharks of the open-ocean are some of the most threatened fish in the sea; around 75% […]
Jason Rossman, sales and marketing representative for East Bay Seafood Company, looks forward to the day when clients open his daily price list and trace the exact position of the vessels that just caught his fish. “We haven’t gone live with this yet,” he says, “but internally we’re ramping up the best way to embed the […]
During the first two weeks of May, a team of Global Fishing Watch developers, designers and project managers gathered in Europe with members of our user community to teach, learn and brainstorm improvements and new uses for our online map and data.
It’s been three weeks since we launched Global Fishing Watch, and the new technology platform has created a buzz around the globe from Europe to Southeast Asia, China, Brazil, Costa Rica, Australia and even landlocked parts of the world such as Pakistan and Iran. Users of the map hail from all over as well, and while there’s […]
Analysis from SkyTruth and Global Fishing Watch shows ship tracks jumping thousands of miles from their true locations. Bjorn Bergman works with SkyTruth and with the Global Fishing Watch research team to track vessels broadcasting false automatic identification system (AIS) locations and to investigate new sources of satellite data for vessel tracking and for detecting […]
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