Five New Vessel Registry Data Sources Integrated

With support from TMT, Global Fishing Watch has integrated five new registry data sources into its data pipeline.  Information is updated monthly and accessible across the platform, specifically through Vessel Viewer and the Vessels API. 

The integration expands Global Fishing Watch’s vessel identity information and coverage for fishing and fishing support vessels. This update improves vessel identity data quality and strengthens compliance risk assessment, forced labor tracking and global fishing fleet monitoring. 

What’s new? 

• S&P Global Ships Data: Building on data from the International Maritime Organization (IMO), users now have access to maritime intelligence data (appearing as “SNP” in the registry source code). This expands access to critical vessel information fields such as ownership, year built, length and gross tonnage, where available. 
  
  
• Enriched compliance background: Vessel background information has been enriched through three new sources. Where available, these sources trigger a TMT logo on the vessel profile, inviting users to reach out to TMT for more information (appearing as “TMT_Other_Official” in registry source code):
  • The US Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) sanctioned vessel list.
  • The International Labor Organization (ILO) list of vessels involved in cases of seafarer abandonment.
  • Records of vessel detentions under the Paris MOU.
    Note: The TMT logo and contact us feature is available to designated country partner users upon request. 

• Brazilian General Fisheries Registry (RGP): This new source populates vessel profiles for the Brazilian national fishing fleet. It includes vessel identity and specification information associated with vessels tracked by the Brazilian vessel monitoring system (VMS). To protect data sensitivity, this new source is currently visible only to the Brazilian government users for cross-verification. 

This integration is part of an ongoing effort to pull data from TMT’s Fisheries Analytical Capacity Tool (FACT) database into the Global Fishing Watch platform. Both organizations remain committed to expanding access to over 80,000 fishing and fishing support vessel profiles now available with richer identity and historical information, thereby driving transparency, strengthening fisheries management and ocean governance.  

S&P replaces IMO data source

Since February 2026, Global Fishing Watch has been unable to effectively integrate IMO data sources into its data pipeline due to changes in the IMO data platform’s restrictions. By integrating the S&P Global source — which supports the same data feed as IMO — we have successfully backfilled the identity gaps for fishing and fishing support vessels between February and June 2026. Other vessel types will be included in future updates. 

Next steps

As we phase in S&P Global Ships Data, we will retire overlapping IMO sources. Users may notice a shift in the contributing registry sources listed on their vessel profiles. 

Find our user guide, supporting information and the API documentation on the Global Fishing Watch website. To help us make the platform more useful, please share your thoughts or suggest additional data sources through our map’s built-in feedback form or add platform requests to our public Canny board.

For general Global Fishing Watch platform use support, contact: [email protected] 
For APIs use support, contact: [email protected]