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 [...]
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 [...]
Total fishing effort in the north Pacific from January 2017 to January 2018. The region within the white outline is the North Pacific Fisheries Commission management area. Earlier this month, Global Fishing Watch attended a meeting of the North Pacific Fisheries Commission (NPFC), a relatively new Regional Fisheries Management Organization (RFMO) charged [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
We published a logistic regression model for fishing localization a while a go as a python library built on top of scikit-learn. In this blog-post I’ll give you a quick introduction to how it can be used. The data we’re going to use is an AIS track exported from Google’s BigQuery, containing the columns timestamp (seconds since epoch), course (degrees) [...]
Today we published our initial research on transshipment at sea. Transshipment at sea is where a fishing vessel offloads its catch to a refrigerated cargo vessel (or “reefer”) far from port. You can download a copy of our report via this link. The image above was created by our data scientist Nate Miller, who has [...]
For the first release of Global Fishing Watch, we included only vessels that had more than 1000 positions in a given year, and broadcast their identity as fishing vessels 100 percent of the time in their AIS identity messages. The list of these mmsi can be seen here. However, many vessels have fewer than 1000 position [...]
Background One of the main outputs of the Global Fishing Watch project is the interactive map of global fishing. This map presented some particular challenges to implement. This blog post is about these challenges and our solutions to them. Vessel tracks are derived from time series data, that is, ordered points, each of which each have [...]
