Something we hear often about tracking vessels with Automatic Identification Signals (AIS) is that transponders can be turned off. Fishers that don’t want to be caught doing something illegal or questionable will simply “go dark.”
Going Dark: When Vessels Turn Off AIS Broadcasts Read More »
The satellite-based Automatic Identification System (AIS) that we use for tracking vessels is a radio transmission system in which a ship sends a coded message that can be picked up by satellite and land-based receivers. The code includes
Spoofing: One Identity Shared by Multiple Vessels Read More »
On dry land, ecologists and conservationists can map our human footprints on the landscape. We can see deforestation, mountaintop removal, river damming and development, and it is relatively easy to recognize our impacts on an ecosystem and the plants and animals that live there.
Every day we download more than 20 million data points, giving us the positions of the about two hundred thousand vessels in the world. To see where these vessels traveled in 2015, I plotted their positions to create the map you see above. This map shows all vessels carrying AIS, and not just fishing vessels, and
What Does Five Billion Look Like? Read More »
Most of the oceans are over the horizon and under the waves. As a result, the ocean is incredibly difficult to monitor. With regards to fishing, most of our data on where and when fishing occurs comes from data collected at port or through the logs of
Beyond the Horizon Read More »
The sheer size of the ocean poses one of the biggest challenges to curbing illegal fishing, especially for a tiny island nation like Palau whose territorial waters encompass a swath of ocean nearly the size of Texas. With just three vessels comprising the government’s patrol fleet, there has been little hope of defending Palauan waters
Right on Target, Satellite Monitoring Guided a Police Chase on the Open Ocean Read More »
We’re in the business of putting the simple truth on the table for others to see. So for us, there’s nothing more rewarding than learning that the information we share has been used to accomplish something important. In early 2016, observations we posted on the SkyTruth blog initiated a chain of events that exposed a fleet
Our Analyst Nets Another IUU Bust Read More »
The Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), located in the central Pacific between Hawaii and Australia, is the world’s largest UNESCO World Heritage Site. Spanning a swath of ocean roughly the size of California, its hosts a series of isolated seamounts and almost entirely uninhabited islands, all supporting rich, largely unspoiled ecosystems.
Ending Hide & Seek at Sea: Global Fishing Watch in Science Read More »
When it looks like spaghetti, it may be fishing. That’s one of the first lessons students learn when they’re working with Kristina Boerder, one of our academic partners from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Of course, she’s not teaching them about pasta. She’s teaching them about the movement patterns of ships at sea. The
Reading Tracks on the Water: A Team Effort for Humans and Machines Read More »
