On March 1st 2020, Indonesian authorities seized five Vietnamese vessels fishing illegally in the North Natuna Sea, located south west of Indonesia’s Natuna Islands, which borders the South China Sea. The successful operation was conducted by patrol vessels from the Indonesian Directorate General (DG) of Surveillance (PSDKP) of The Ministry of Marine Affairs and [...]
Tony Long, CEO, Global Fishing Watch Once again, Chile shows it is serious about ocean protection. Putting its fishing vessel tracking data on Global Fishing Watch’s public platform will help to build more transparent and sustainable fisheries. The May 2019 United Nations report warning of unprecedented rates of extinction of marine life [...]
by Nicola Frost, Tony Long, Stephanie Juwana and Mansi Konar When the UN launched the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) five years ago, the world aligned around the need to end illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing by 2020 (SDG 14.4). Seen then as an achievable target, it is now a deadline we’re going to miss. IUU fishing accounts for [...]
Juan Carlos is a PhD Student at UC Santa Barbara where he combines economics, technology, and data science to study marine conservation. To conserve or not to conserve Protecting large portions of our oceans from extractive activities can provide enormous benefits to society: food provisioning, carbon storage and sequestration, tourism, storm attenuation [...]
By April 2020, some 750 artisanal fishing vessels targeting jumbo flying squid and mahi-mahi are expected to join the Peruvian Vessel Monitoring System (VMS). As these vessels - 365 so far - are newly incorporated into Peru’s VMS, they will also appear for the first time on the public Global Fishing Watch (GFW) map. [...]
In 2018, Global Fishing Watch (GFW) published the first ever global maps of fishing activity using AIS data. These fishing maps drew on billions of GPS positions broadcast by over 60,000 fishing vessels, and they revealed fishing operations in all oceans in incredible detail. Click on the image to access the atlas. [...]
Global Fishing Watch data assists US Coast Guard patrol in the Pacific. The 2019 patrol produced a threefold increase in vessel boardings and an eightfold increase in identified violations compared to 2018. Captain Adam Morrison has 12 years of experience patrolling the oceans of the world with the United States Coast Guard (USCG) during his [...]
Gabriel Englander, PhD candidate, University of California, Berkeley. Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics. Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) are perhaps the largest property rights institution in the world, covering about 39% of the ocean’s surface and accounting for more than 95% of global marine fish catch. Because assigning property rights can improve both ecological [...]
Eric D Galbraith, professor at McGill University and associate faculty at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, shares his journey to a new paper, Growth Limitation of Marine Fish by Low Iron Availability in the Open Ocean, that harnesses Global Fishing Watch data with a healthy dose of collaboration and curiosity. The story of this [...]
Global Fishing Watch recently met with port authorities and offered training on its commercial fishing activity platform in three important Peruvian fishing ports (Paita, Chimbote and Callao). Fisheries Analyst, Eloy Aroni, describes in this blog post how these meetings were an opportunity to discuss data and technology solutions to the main issues affecting each [...]
Why is Global Fishing Watch (GFW), a non-profit organization, investing so much effort into collaborating with scientists to publish research papers? And why has the program been so successful in doing so? In this blog, GFW Research and Innovation Director, David Kroodsma outlines why we are pursuing this work, why he believes it has [...]
A notorious vessel wanted in several jurisdictions was recently seized by Indonesia. Here’s the story of how international cooperation between INTERPOL, Indonesia, the Government of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (GSGSSI) - UK, Korea and Panama, together with Global Fishing Watch’s vessel tracking expertise, helped make it happen. Lea esta historia en [...]
Eric Galbraith is an ICREA research professor based at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Jerome Guiet is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. Read their new study. Most of the activity that Global Fishing Watch monitors is carried out by industrial fisheries, [...]
This year’s first fishing season for Peruvian anchovy opens on May 4th and for the first time ever anyone can track the fishing fleet as the season progresses, thanks to the recent agreement to publish Peru's vessel data via Global Fishing Watch’s public map. En español Monitoring of the Peruvian anchovy fleet using the national Vessel [...]
After just over a year at the helm, Global Fishing Watch CEO, Tony Long, reflects on how a freely accessible and near real-time digital map of the global ocean is exposing illegal fishing and changing the rules of the game, and calls on all governments to contribute data and join the movement for universal [...]
