Global Fishing Watch’s updated fishing data offers new insight into the presence and behavior of the global fishing fleet In 2018, we published the first-ever global assessment of commercial fishing activity in Science. We tracked over 60,000 fishing vessels between 2012 and 2016, and estimated that fishing occurred on more than half of the [...]
Improvements to our fishing effort data and vessel classification can help promote transparency of human activity on the world’s oceans In 2018, Global Fishing Watch released its first public fishing effort data that included almost 142 million hours of fishing from over 73,000 unique maritime mobile service identity (MMSI) numbers. The dataset, spanning 2012-2016, [...]
One year into the pandemic that triggered turmoil around the world, an analysis of Global Fishing Watch data sheds light on shifts in global fishing activity As the world marks the March 11th anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, the fishing sector—like many industries—continues to feel the effects. With [...]
Analysis from SkyTruth and Global Fishing Watch shows ship tracks jumping thousands of miles from their true locations. Bjorn Bergman works with SkyTruth and with the Global Fishing Watch research team to track vessels broadcasting false automatic identification system (AIS) locations and to investigate new sources of satellite data for vessel tracking and for [...]
This blog post is the first in a series that we will be releasing on the effects of COVID-19 on global fishing activity. The world is currently experiencing a pandemic due to the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, and the impacts are being felt in nearly all aspects of life. As countries around the world issue [...]
Global Fishing Watch is excited to announce the launch of our data download portal, a new system for accessing our data. This platform is designed to provide a more streamlined, flexible, and customizable approach to downloading our data, with the goal of facilitating more frequent data updates moving forward. The portal will be used [...]
At Global Fishing Watch, we use cutting-edge technology to visualize, track and share data about global fishing activity in near real-time and for free. Our primary dataset comes from data about a vessel’s identity, type, location, speed, direction and more that is broadcast using the Automatic Identification System (AIS) and collected via satellites and [...]
Introduction Global Fishing Watch is committed to increasing the transparency of the world’s fisheries. Open science is a key component of this message and Global Fishing Watch strives to make as much data and code publicly available as possible. In addition to our map, these data are a way to provide users with a fine [...]
Global Fishing Watch is committed to increasing the transparency of the world’s fisheries. Open science is a key component of this message and we strive to make as much data and code publicly available as possible. In addition to our map, data are available in several formats, including as downloadable files, BigQuery tables, and [...]
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 [...]
