This post originally appeared on our Data Blog The sample vessel track below shows position broadcasts of the Jin Sheng No.2, a Chinese fishing vessel with mmsi number 413270430. Over three weeks in March of 2015, this vessel steamed from the central Pacific to the coast of Japan, Korea, and China. While moving, a vessel […]
Example of AIS Data for One Vessel Read More »
We are often asked about how Global Fishing Watch can be effective when vessel captains can simply turn off their AIS. And our answer has always been, “they have to turn it back on sometime—especially when entering port, and intentional blackouts raise a red flag.” Our recent analysis of fleet activity around the Argentine EEZ
What Can We See When AIS Signals Disappear? Read More »
AIS GAPS BY FLEET: January 1, 2017 – July 10,2017 On the maps below, each point indicates the start of a gap in AIS signals from a fishing vessel lasting more than 24 hours. [Read about our AIS gap analysis around the Argentine Exclusive Economic Zone] Number of gaps by flag state:
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) and speed (knots).
Fishing localization using the vessel-scoring library Read More »
Since our launch in September, we have added 25,000 more fishing vessels to our database. Our new Beta release 2.0 now includes 60,000 fishing vessels. Although the number of fishing boats using AIS and the number of satellites receiving their signals have been steadily rising around the world, the vast majority of our gains have
Beta Release 2.0: Nearly Doubling our Database of Commercial Fishing Vessels Read More »
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 spent
Transshipment Data and Report Read More »
It’s been just over five months since Global Fishing Watch launched publicly, and this week, we hope to make another splash by not just mapping global fishing activity, but by providing an unprecedented view of very specific activity by a very specific class of vessels around the world. Today, at the Economist World Ocean Summit
Transshipment: A Global Footprint Never Seen Before Read More »
Over the past couple of months, SkyTruth analyst Bjorn Bergman has been watching some interesting activity by the Chinese fishing fleet in the Pacific. A large Chinese flagged squid-fishing fleet had been fishing at the boundary of Peru’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) throughout the summer and fall of 2016. Then, near the middle of December,
Mystery Moves: What’s Up in the Pacific? Read More »
This post has been adapted from “Updated Vessel Lists 0.2” which appeared on our Data Blog for researchers and software engineers by David Kroodsma. Automating the process of identifying all industrial-scale fishing activity in near-real time on a global scale through AIS data is something that’s never been done. Inventing something new often means first
Making the Cut–Creating Our List of Fishing Vessels Read More »
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
Updated Fishing Lists – Version 0.2 Read More »
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
Web Visualization at Scale Read More »
The first step in catching illegal and unreported fishing activity can feel a little like casting a net over a wide swath of the ocean. There’s going to be a lot of bycatch, because much of what fits in your net isn’t really what you’re after. It takes some background knowledge and often a little
Deciphering Suspicious Behavior: Not Always What It Seems Read More »
‘Tis the season, and even fishers want to be home for the holidays. The flag state filter in Global Fishing Watch allows us to select vessels flagged to a specific country or countries. In the spirit of the season, we decided to use it to see if a cultural tradition that has nothing to do with fishing
Fishing Fleet Goes Home for the Holidays Read More »
When two ships meet to transfer goods, it is called transshipment. In the fisheries industry, it is sometimes legal in ports, but usually illegal out at sea where the practice can’t be monitored. [You can read more about it here]. Transshipment can facilitate the mixing of illegal or unreported catch with legal catch, making it
Identifying Transshipment From the Data Read More »
Automatic Identification System (AIS) messages are transmitted over radio waves. The system was designed, in part, so that vessels could “see” the positions of nearby ships on a monitor and avoid collisions. These radio signals are received by satellites and used for many monitoring purposes. Each boat can broadcast a distinct message as often as every two
What Does an AIS Message Look Like Anyway? Read More »
