Last week, a visitor to our site asked if Global Fishing Watch can be used to track whaling ships. The short answer is yes, sometimes. At the moment, our machine learning algorithms are being designed to classify three major types of fishing activity—trawling, longlining and purse seining—but some whaling vessels report themselves as “fishing vessels,” […]
Today we published our initial research on transshipment at sea. Transshipment at sea is where a fishing vessel offloads its catch to a refrigerated cargo vessel (or “reefer”) far from port. You can download a copy of our report via this link. The image above was created by our data scientist Nate Miller, who has spent […]
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 […]
Background One of the main outputs of the Global Fishing Watch project is the interactive map of global fishing. This map presented some particular challenges to implement. This blog post is about these challenges and our solutions to them. Vessel tracks are derived from time series data, that is, ordered points, each of which each have […]
The data in the portal is created using automatic identification system (AIS) data. AIS transmits a ship’s position so that others can be made aware of its location and avoid potential collision. AIS transmits a ship’s location, speed, direction, and identity information, such as a vessel’s name and flag. Global Fishing Watch uses AIS data […]
When we look at the Global Fishing Watch map, we often see fishing activity that appears to move together. That is, we see groups of vessels consistently fishing in proximity to each other even as the group as a whole moves about the ocean. In other words, we see fleets. Some members of our team, […]
Today, with our publication in Science, we are releasing fishing effort data for 2012 to 2016. One of the ways we are releasing it is through Google’s Earth Engine. There is a bit of a steep learning curve on Earth Engine – you have to be able to code in JavaScript or Python. But once you […]
Check out this Tweet by Rustu Yucel who used the Global Fishing Watch map to watch the close of the fishing season in Cypress this summer!
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 […]
In October 2024, Global Fishing Watch released two important improvements to port visit data to resolve errors. 1. Port visit data error We identified an error affecting a small percentage of confidence 4 level port visits shown on vessel tracks in our APIs and Global Fishing Watch and TMT Vessel Viewer. Some false confidence 4 […]
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