Kimbra Cutlip, Author at Global Fishing Watch

Deep water seamounts are rich with diversity

Video Expedition Hopes to Capture and Protect Deep Sea Diversity off Southern California

Once considered to be a cold, dark desert nearly devoid of life, the deep sea is now known to support more species of marine life than the shallow reefs of the tropics. A menagerie of corals, sponges and undiscovered creatures—some of them previously unimaginable, others known only from the fossil record, lies hidden in near complete darkness […]

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Going Dark: When Vessels Turn Off AIS Broadcasts

Data and technology / By Kimbra Cutlip

Something we hear often about tracking vessels with Automatic Identification Signals (AIS) is that transponders can be turned off. Fishers that don’t want to be caught doing something illegal or questionable will simply “go dark.”

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Spoofing: One Identity Shared by Multiple Vessels

Data and technology / By Kimbra Cutlip

The satellite-based Automatic Identification System (AIS) that we use for tracking vessels is a radio transmission system in which a ship sends a coded message that can be picked up by satellite and land-based receivers. The code includes

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Interview with Marine Ecologist Dr. Doug McCauley

News & Views / By Kimbra Cutlip

Last year, Dr. Doug McCauley told the New York Times that humanity may be on the verge of creating a mass extinction in the seas unless we can rapidly change our course. McCauley and his colleagues had just published a paper in Science magazine on the health of the oceans that drew a lot of

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Scientists develop precise methods to identify and measure three very different types of fishing activity

Article / By Kimbra Cutlip

On dry land, ecologists and conservationists can map our human footprints on the landscape. We can see deforestation, mountaintop removal, river damming and development, and it is relatively easy to recognize our impacts on an ecosystem and the plants and animals that live there. In the ocean, our impacts are less tangible. Water covers more

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What Does Five Billion Look Like?

Data and technology / By Kimbra Cutlip

Every day we download more than 20 million data points, giving us the positions of the about two hundred thousand vessels in the world. To see where these vessels traveled in 2015, I plotted their positions to create the map you see above. This map shows all vessels carrying AIS, and not just fishing vessels, and

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Beyond the Horizon

Fisheries / By Global Fishing Watch

Most of the oceans are over the horizon and under the waves. As a result, the ocean is incredibly difficult to monitor. With regards to fishing, most of our data on where and when fishing occurs comes from data collected at port or through the logs of

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Right on Target, Satellite Monitoring Guided a Police Chase on the Open Ocean

Policy & Compliance / By Kimbra Cutlip

The sheer size of the ocean poses one of the biggest challenges to curbing illegal fishing, especially for a tiny island nation like Palau whose territorial waters encompass a swath of ocean nearly the size of Texas. With just three vessels comprising the government’s patrol fleet, there has been little hope of defending Palauan waters

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Interview with Marine Ecologist, Boris Worm

News & Views / By Kimbra Cutlip

Dr. Boris Worm is a world renowned marine ecologist and professor of marine conservation biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Co-author or primary author of more than 100 articles in leading science journals, he has made a significant contribution to the scientific understanding of marine biodiversity and conservation,

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Who Owns the Fish: High Seas and the EEZs

Article / By Kimbra Cutlip

To look out over the ocean at a horizon that stretches for thousands of miles, it’s almost easy to understand how we have allowed overfishing to become such a serious problem. It’s that very quality of limitlessness that led the world to believe there would always be enough. The very nature of the sea, untamed and

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Our Analyst Nets Another IUU Bust

Policy & Compliance / By Kimbra Cutlip

We’re in the business of putting the simple truth on the table for others to see. So for us, there’s nothing more rewarding than learning that the information we share has been used to accomplish something important. In early 2016, observations we posted on the SkyTruth blog initiated a chain of events that exposed a fleet

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Ending Hide & Seek at Sea: Global Fishing Watch in Science

Data and technology / By Kimbra Cutlip

The Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), located in the central Pacific between Hawaii and Australia, is the world’s largest UNESCO World Heritage Site. Spanning a swath of ocean roughly the size of California, its hosts a series of isolated seamounts and almost entirely uninhabited islands, all supporting rich, largely unspoiled ecosystems.

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Making Headlines: We’re On to Something!

News & Views / By Kimbra Cutlip

It’s been less than two years since we first demonstrated the Global Fishing Watch prototype in public, and the media coverage hasn’t stopped. Since announcing the prototype we’ve been featured in more than 100 publications on six continents, from the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal and International Business Times to media outlets in Russia, China,

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Reading Tracks on the Water: A Team Effort for Humans and Machines

Data and technology / By Kimbra Cutlip

When it looks like spaghetti, it may be fishing. That’s one of the first lessons students learn when they’re working with Kristina Boerder, one of our academic partners from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Of course, she’s not teaching them about pasta. She’s teaching them about the movement patterns of ships at sea. The

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Peter Benchley Ocean Awards: Global Fishing Watch Partners Win Big

News & Views / By Kimbra Cutlip

For a gathering of enthusiastic supporters of ocean conservation, you can’t do better than the Peter Benchley Ocean Awards. Referred to as the “Academy Awards for the Ocean” the event honors individuals from a variety of disciplines for their outstanding leadership in ocean conservation.

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