Where do sharks and boats cross paths? What about sea turtles and whales? If we knew this, maybe we could reduce the number of vulnerable marine animals that end up entangled or accidentally caught in fishing gear. After years of monitoring large pelagic sea life with remote tracking devices, researchers have started to build a picture of
Occasionally, the AIS messages transmitted from a ship provide a location that makes no sense, say, in the middle of the Antarctic or over a mountain range. In such cases, either the AIS transponder has malfunctioned, the data got scrambled in transmission, or the system has been tampered with in a deliberate attempt to disguise
The satellite-based Automatic Identification System (AIS) is great for locating vessels, but it’s not fully reliable for identifying them. AIS broadcasts coded messages that include information about a vessel’s identity such as its name, ship
Clarifying Identity: Matching Broadcasts to Vessel Registries Read More »
Once considered to be a cold, dark desert nearly devoid of life, the deep sea is now known to support more species of marine life than the shallow reefs of the tropics. A menagerie of corals, sponges and undiscovered creatures—some of them previously unimaginable, others known only from the fossil record, lies hidden in near complete darkness
Video Expedition Hopes to Capture and Protect Deep Sea Diversity off Southern California 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
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 »
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