Why is Global Fishing Watch (GFW), a non-profit organization, investing so much effort into collaborating with scientists to publish research papers? And why has the program been so successful in doing so? In this blog, GFW Research and Innovation Director, David Kroodsma outlines why we are pursuing this work, why he believes it has [...]
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 [...]
Staring at the Global Fishing Watch map, your eye is inevitably drawn to patterns of vessels that move together. These fishing patterns are most evident in the world’s longline fleets, which you can sometimes see moving north and south, as temperatures change, following migrations of fish. These fishing vessels are moving in “fleets” with [...]
Jaeyoon Park, Data Scientist Our groundbreaking online map tracks the movements of commercial fishing vessels all over the world. As part of our ambition to reveal and analyse the fishing activity responsible for the majority of the world’s marine catch, we’re constantly working to improve the quality of the data behind the [...]
On the pages of Science Magazine (comment and response), Twitter, the University of Washington's Sustainable Fisheries blog, and The Atlantic, my co-authors and I have engaged in a healthy debate with University of Washington researchers about how to measure the global footprint of fisheries. This exchange has helped raise awareness of different ways to measure, understand, [...]
Earlier this year we published in Science the first global assessment of fishing activity using AIS data, providing an unprecedented view into the activity of tens of thousands of large, industrial fishing vessels. We’ve made these fishing effort data publicly available, which is now leading a slew of advances in our understanding of fishing [...]
One of the ways we have released our data is through Google’s BigQuery. BigQuery allows one to easily aggregate the data or select only the region or time period of interest. We have posted some example queries here. One our colleagues, Juan Mayorga of UCSB and National Geographic Pristine Seas, recently wrote a tutorial on [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 BigQuery. https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/ If you have not used BigQuery, vist here and click on try it free to get started. You can query up to one terabyte per month for no charge, which [...]
Our research paper, “Tracking the global footprint of fisheries," was published today in Science. A key finding of the study is that fishing is remarkably non-seasonal at a global scale. What matters far more than any natural annual cycle, it turns out, are cultural and political factors: fishers in North America and Europe don't [...]
Today is an exciting day for the Global Fishing Watch Research program. Working with six partner institutions, we have published the first ever global analysis of fishing effort using Automated Identification System (AIS) data. Our paper, "Tracking the global footprint of fisheries," is in the February 23rd edition of Science. Along with the publication of this [...]
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 [...]
Today Global Fishing Watch releases the first version of our global database of anchorages. This database contains over 100,000 locations where AIS transmitting vessels congregated and includes large industrial ports, smaller fishing harbors, and individual docks and piers. For more information regarding the development of this dataset, ways in which you can contribute to [...]
Based on a lengthly review of refrigerated cargo vessels, we have just updated our transshipment data. You can read about the update here or download the slightly updated report and data here. The overall story of transshipments, as Nate notes in this post, is unchanged. This is a very rich dataset, giving the time and duration of thousands [...]
