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 …
New Techniques Reveal Fishing Vessel Identities in the Dark of Night Read More »
Satellite radar imagery is lighting up our view of previously unseen fishing patterns around the world Last week, we announced the winners of the xView3 contest to use satellite radar imagery and artificial intelligence to reveal vessels at sea. This week, we give you a gist of what this technology can do when deployed at …
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 …
Breakthroughs in Science: The Global Fishing Watch Research Program Read More »
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, …
From Vessels to Fleets – A Data Science Journey with HDBSCAN Read More »
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 …
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 …
A who’s who for the oceans: building a global database of fishing vessels Read More »
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 …
Half the Ocean? A Response to the University of Washington’s Blog Read More »
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 in …
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 these …
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 …
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 …
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 …
The Dynamics of the Global Fishing Fleet – Interactive Read More »
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 likely …
