This week, at the United Nation’s Ocean Conference, the Republic of Indonesia becomes the first nation ever to publish Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) data revealing the location and activity of its commercial fishing fleet. The new data being made public on the Global Fishing Watch public mapping platform reveals commercial fishing in Indonesian waters and […]
What information can be accessed in the public apparent fishing effort dataset and what has changed in the latest release?
Partnership and collective understanding will set the course for Global Fishing Watch’s work ahead And so ends another year—a year that many are perhaps eager to close out. I think it’s fair to say that none of us imagined 2020 would have panned out like this. Twelve months ago we were all preparing for a […]
The recent publication of Global Fishing Watch’s paper, Tracking the global footprint of fishing, in the journal, Science, has attracted considerable media attention and commentary. Two common headlines used in media reports are that “over half the ocean is fished” and that the spatial extent of fishing is “four times that of agriculture.” In responses to these […]
Global Fishing Watch, PACÍFICO and the Forever Costa Rica Association applaud Costa Rica’s decision to share vessel tracking data and its commitment to enhancing monitoring and control of its waters San José, Costa Rica – The Costa Rican government today announced an agreement to make its vessel tracking data available through Global Fishing Watch (GFW), […]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 22, 2017 Contacts: Kimbra Cutlip, [email protected] +1.443.871.1632 David Kroodsma, [email protected], +1.415.656.7540 Mara Harris, [email protected] Hidden No More: The First-Ever Global View of Transshipment in the Commercial Fishing Industry Transshipment, the transfer of goods from one boat to another, is a major pathway for illegally caught and unreported fish to enter the global […]
A wave of ocean action shows opportunities for greater transparency toward marine governance Tony Long, CEO, Global Fishing Watch 2022 dawned with even more uncertainty than most years. With COVID-19 lingering, it was unclear if the ocean conservation and fisheries management communities could hold the international meetings necessary to kick start work that had stalled […]
New Global Fishing Watch technology merges nighttime images with GPS datasets to observe vessels not broadcasting their positions When the sun sets, human activity on the ocean goes on. And every night, satellites snap a picture of all the activity taking place down below, including vessels at sea. Vessels often are equipped with bright lights […]
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 […]
New research published in the journal Biological Conservation sheds light on the contentious debate surrounding large Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) that restrict or prohibit fishing and other activities. By combining established shark tracking methods with the publicly available Global Fishing Watch platform that allows anyone to track fishing activity anywhere in the world, scientists have demonstrated that […]
