From January 26 to April 10, 2024, we have had an error in Global Fishing Watch data.
This error has impacted both automatic identification system (AIS) and vessel monitoring system (VMS) data in the Global Fishing Watch platform, as well as data pulled from the data download portal and APIs.
We have now fully resolved the AIS and VMS errors and updated all sources from 26 January 2024 onwards, so the data is now appearing correctly in the map, platform and APIs.Â
Any use of the estimated fishing data during the time range of January 26 – April 10, 2024 should be assumed to be incorrect and will require revision to ensure accuracy in fishing estimates.Â
The error caused an incorrect assignment of a vessel position identified as fishing, leading to some incorrect categorization as fishing in the map and data and was caused by an incorrect code adjustment in our fishing algorithm.Â
We apologize for this error and we are working in the background to enact measures to safeguard against this in the future.Â
Please email [email protected] with any further questions or inquiries.
Technical details
This issue mainly affected fishing effort and fishing hours. Fishing effort was overestimated and was flagged when a vessel was present in an area but not fishing.
This issue didn’t impact all fishing events because fishing events have additional logic that removes false positives (events marked as fishing that are unlikely to be fishing). Further, our algorithm does not require every point in a series of fishing events to be classified as a fishing position because they are aggregated. However, we strongly recommend discarding the fishing events downloaded between 26 January to 10 April 2024 and using the fixed dataset.