Today, we are pleased to announce that, through a partnership with Spire Global, Inc, we have doubled the amount of data we use to identify and track nearly 60,000 commercial fishing vessels on the world’s oceans. Publicly broadcast Automatic Identification System (AIS) messages received by satellites and ground-based receivers comprise the largest source of data in the […]
Adding Nano-Satellite Data Doubles Our Resolution Read More »
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 of
Temporal Footprint of Transshipment Read More »
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 »
The maritime Automatic Identification System (AIS) is a radio communications system by which vessels continuously broadcast their identity and position over public airwaves using unencrypted VHS radio signals. When it was developed almost 20 years ago, its primary purpose was to increase safety at sea: ships needed a better way to “see” each other and
AIS for Safety and Tracking: A Brief History Read More »
In early 2017, we released an original report based on analysis of our data that revealed remarkable new insights about what goes on between fishing vessels at sea. The machine learning platform we developed found that over the past five years, there were more than 86,000 potential cases in which fishing vessels transferred their catch
86,490 Points on a Map: All Potential Transshipments 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 »
