David Kroodsma

New Techniques Reveal Fishing Vessel Identities in the Dark of Night

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 […]

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Commonwealth Club The Global Fishing Watch Research Program

Breakthroughs in Science: The Global Fishing Watch Research Program

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 been

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From Vessels to Fleets – A Data Science Journey with HDBSCAN

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,

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Screengrab global map

Match-making at sea: how to find fishing fleets

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 similar

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Fishermen set out for sea after summer fishing suspension ends, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, China - 16 Sep 2014.

A who’s who for the oceans: building a global database of fishing vessels

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 dots. Here, Data Scientist Jaeyoon Park takes

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Global Fishing Activity

Half the Ocean? A Response to the University of Washington’s Blog

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, and

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Our Data in BigQuery

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 is

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Ocean image

The Dynamics of the Global Fishing Fleet – Interactive

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 work

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