Global Fishing Watch Map EXPLORE OUR MAP The Global Fishing Watch map is the first open-access online platform for visualization and analysis of vessel-based human activity at sea. Powered by satellite technology and machine learning, the map merges multiple types of vessel tracking data to provide a view of global human activity at sea, including […]
New technologies, expanded partnerships and policy breakthroughs move the organization closer to its 2030 goal of embedding transparency as global norm in ocean governance
Global Fishing Watch believes that transparency of fishing activity is key to achieving sustainable global fisheries. In line with our mission to create and publicly share knowledge about human activity at sea, the first versions of our map have focused on fishing as the most widespread human activity, and on industrial fishing as the sector […]
Global Fishing Watch commends the Republic of Marshall Islands’ leadership toward fisheries transparency KOROR, THE REPUBLIC OF PALAU – The Republic of the Marshall Islands has committed to sharing its vessel monitoring data on Global Fishing Watch’s public map, bolstering ocean governance and promoting compliance throughout some of the world’s richest fishing grounds. This momentous […]
Why is there a difference? Within the Global Fishing Watch AIS processing, every AIS position is estimated as potential ‘fishing’ or not. Fishing effort is intended to act as a high level summary of the summed hours of potential fishing for a given vessel or area over time. However, when looking at the individual voyage […]
In March 2025, we released version 3.0 of the downloadable static Global Fishing Watch apparent fishing effort dataset here. Data is available for 2012-2024 and based on positions of >190,000 unique automatic identification system (AIS) devices on fishing vessels, of which up to ~96,000 are active in a given year. What is different between the […]
On World Ocean Day in June 2017, we partnered with Minister Susi Pudjiastuti and the Indonesian Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries to publicly release Indonesian Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) data. This was the first ever public release of VMS data. Previously accessible only in a dedicated public workspace on our site, this data is […]
Not necessarily. The resolution of each grid cell changes with the zoom level, you can see the resolution in the legend of each apparent fishing effort layer (for example in the screenshot, 120 km2 is the approximate grid cell area at equator). Each grid cell adds fishing effort for the area of the cell, so […]
When you select an ‘Apparent fishing effort’ layer within the side panel, every grid cell on the map is displaying the intensity of apparent fishing activity as recognized by our algorithm. To explore other types of human activity, select the ‘Vessel presence’ layer on the left sidebar.
Harnessing automatic identification system data to advance global transparency through structured risk indicators and network metrics
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