A new Python package is now available for interacting with Global Fishing Watch APIs, allowing access to apparent AIS apparent fishing effort, SAR vessel detections, vessel behavior and event data through an interface that is user-friendly and scriptable.
Global Fishing Watch is proud to introduce this new open-source package, designed to help technical users streamline their data workflows and integrate our API-based datasets more easily into research, monitoring tools and custom dashboards.
Anyone can now:
- Access apparent AIS fishing effort, SAR vessel detections, vessel identity and events data programmatically through a simplified Python interface
- Use built-in functions that handle authentication, filtering and pagination with minimal setup
- Review and test Global Fishing Watch data using Jupyter notebooks
- Incorporate Global Fishing Watch data directly into Jupyter notebooks, pandas pipelines or geospatial tools like geopandas
- Reduce time spent crafting manual requests or parsing API responses
- Install the package directly via PyPI:
pip install gfw-api-python-client
The package is fully documented and freely available to the public. It was developed in response to internal analytics, which showed high usage of Python among our API users. With Python ranked as one of the most popular programming languages globally—particularly among scientists and developers—this release ensures that Global Fishing Watch continues to meet users where they are.
Global Fishing Watch also maintains gfwr, an R package with similar functionalities.
This release is part of our commitment to removing friction for users of Global Fishing Watch’s open data and helping our community of researchers, NGOs, journalists and institutions derive insights faster and more effectively from our platform.
We invite you to explore the package and see how it can enhance your workflow or applications.
📚 Resources
We’d love to hear from you! Let us know how we can improve the package or support your use of GFW data. You can leave feedback:
For API-specific support, contact: [email protected]Â
Release – Friday 11 April