Camellia Williams is a Lead Writer at Vizzuality. See her original blog post here. We love hearing stories about people changing the world with the things we help make. This month we were contacted by Luli Masera. Luli is the co-founder of the Marine Conservation programme of Tompkins Conservation in Argentina and she had some extremely [...]
Global Fishing Watch and Oceana applaud Peru’s leadership on fisheries transparency Washington, D.C. Friday October 26th - As world leaders prepare to gather in Bali, Indonesia for the fifth-annual Our Ocean conference, Peru has taken bold action to make its national vessel tracking data publicly available for the first time through Global Fishing Watch [...]
Today, we are releasing an updated version of the Global Fishing Watch map that is easier to use and includes several new features. It also increases your ability to customize the map view. This update comes in response to some great feedback we’ve been getting from our community. You can now: Import custom polygon [...]
Darcy Bradley is a postdoctoral researcher at University of California - Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. Her recent publication in Conservation Letters, Leveraging satellite technology to create true shark sanctuaries, examined how advancements in tracking technology can help us better understand illegal fishing activity and therefore improve fisheries management. What do [...]
Can you actually make a problem worse by promising to solve it? That’s a conundrum that policymakers face — often unwittingly — on a variety of issues. A famous, if controversial, example comes from the gun control debate in the United States, where calls for tougher legislation in the wake of the 2012 Sandy [...]
“Globally, 1 in 5 fish is caught illegally, resulting in losses of between USD$10 billion and $23.5 billion every year.” Tony Long, CEO of Global Fishing Watch, used this stark statistic to open the ‘Youth, Women and Oceans’ Roundtable Discussion. At the current scale of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing (SDG Indicator 14.6.1), [...]
New York, 4 September 2018: Treaty negotiations to conserve and protect nearly two thirds of the ocean open today at the United Nations (UN) in what is widely regarded as the greatest opportunity in a generation to turn the tide on ocean degradation and biodiversity loss. Following over a decade of discussions at the [...]
The Cocos Island National Park (CINP) is located in the Eastern Tropical Pacific, 532 km southwest of Costa Rica. Consisting of a 24 square km island and a 1,989 square km marine area, including a 12 nautical mile no-take zone surrounding the island, it was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 1997 [...]
Guillermo Ortuño Crespo, member of The Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab at Duke University As the extent and diversity of ocean industries continues to grow, the international community faces the challenging task of accommodating multiple ocean uses while minimizing negative ecological impacts across sectoral industries. Oceanic fisheries have grown exponentially since the aftermath [...]
Researchers from Dalhousie University, Global Fishing Watch and SkyTruth map hot spots of transfer of fish catch at sea It could be considered the global CSI for high seas fisheries. In two new groundbreaking studies, researchers from Dalhousie University, Global Fishing Watch and SkyTruth have applied cutting-edge technology to map exactly where fishing [...]
Using bright lights to reveal the 'dark' fleet Christopher Elvidge with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Earth Observation Group writes about matching night-time imagery with monitoring data from fishing vessels to shed new light on the ‘dark’ fleet. The challenges with tracking vessels Vessel tracks from Automatic Identification System (AIS) and [...]
Costa Rica and Global Fishing Watch (GFW), working with the Asociación Costa Rica por Siempre and the Fundación Pacífico, have entered into an agreement to advance transparency in the country’s fisheries. Costa Rica’s Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Environment and Energy signed a letter of intent on May 2nd to make [...]
Researchers explore an alternative pathway to fast-tracking the global recovery of fisheries By Julie Cohen Short-term pain for long-term gain. When applied to the reform of global fisheries, this strategy could yield enormous benefits. If only it were that easy. For many countries — especially those in the developing tropics where fishery reform is needed [...]
In the 23 February 2018 issue of Science, along with research partners at University of California Santa Barbara, National Geographic Pristine Seas, SkyTruth, Dalhousie University, Stanford University, and Google, we published a global analysis of fishing effort using AIS data. We have made our data on the vessel identity and fishing effort freely available. This post provide links [...]
Tracking Fishing from Space: The Global Footprint of Industrial Fishing Revealed Satellite based data show fishing affects four times larger area than agriculture Washington DC, February 22 - A study published today in Science illuminates the extent of global fishing – down to individual vessel movements and hourly activity – and opens an unprecedented [...]
