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. These new methods, though, had yet to be vetted by the […]
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 paper
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 been
Breakthroughs in Science: The Global Fishing Watch Research Program Read More »
Nuno Queiroz and a team of over 150 scientists recently published “Global spatial risk assessment of sharks under the footprint of fisheries” in the journal Nature. Tim White, Global Fishing Watch Fisheries Scientist, was a co-author of this study. Sharks of the open-ocean are some of the most threatened fish in the sea; around 75%
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, working for profit. These businesses are run and staffed
Tim White is a PhD candidate at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station. His recent publication in Science Advances, Predicted hotspots of overlap between highly migratory fishes and industrial fishing fleets in the Northeast Pacific, focuses on how vessel tracking and fish habitat models can help inform management of sharks and tunas. How do you sustainably
Predicting overlap of tunas, sharks, and ships at sea Read More »
The first-ever satellite mapping of fishing vessel behaviours has identified that very few vessels are using one of the key techniques to avoid accidentally killing albatrosses. Researchers hope a new analytics tool demonstrates that satellite data can help monitor efforts to reduce seabird mortality in fishing operations, and drive more transparency in general in the global fishing industry.
Manuel Dureuil is a PhD student researching sharks and Kristina Boerder a postdoctoral fellow working on marine protected areas at Dalhousie University, Canada. In a recent publication in SCIENCE, Elevated trawling inside protected areas undermines conservation outcomes in a global fishing hotspot, Manuel, Kristina and a team of researchers from Dalhousie University, GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre
More fishing inside, more sharks outside marine protected areas Read More »
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 transparency.
Global Fishing Watch 2018 – the year in transparency Read More »
There comes a time when the useful life of an oil platform comes to an end, at least when it comes to drilling for oil, and that’s when we dive in. Blue Latitudes, founded by Emily Hazelwood and myself, is a women-owned environmental consulting firm on a mission to re-purpose offshore oil and gas platforms
Oil rigs alive: marine life abounds in unlikely places Read More »
Darcy Bradley is a postdoctoral researcher at University of California – Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. Her recent publication in Conservation Letters, Leveraging satellite technology to create true shark sanctuaries, examined how advancements in tracking technology can help us better understand illegal fishing activity and therefore improve fisheries management. What do you
How can vessel tracking technology help to create true shark sanctuaries? Read More »
Can you actually make a problem worse by promising to solve it? That’s a conundrum that policymakers face — often unwittingly — on a variety of issues. A famous, if controversial, example comes from the gun control debate in the United States, where calls for tougher legislation in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook
This week marks the publication of the first-ever global assessment of transshipment in a scientific journal. Researchers at Global Fishing Watch and SkyTruth, in the journal Frontiers of Marine Science, published “Identifying Global Patterns of Transshipment Behavior.” What is transshipment? Why does it matter? What have we learned and what remains unknown? Read on to
Using bright lights to reveal the ‘dark’ fleet Christopher Elvidge with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Earth Observation Group writes about matching night-time imagery with monitoring data from fishing vessels to shed new light on the ‘dark’ fleet. The challenges with tracking vessels Vessel tracks from Automatic Identification System (AIS) and Vessel
As the countdown continues to September’s historic first round of United Nations treaty talks on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in the high seas, science and technology are shedding increasingly compelling light on what is currently happening in this previously poorly understood realm. The latest in a series of reports focused on
Satellite tracking shows the economics of much high seas fishing does not add up Read More »
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