Last week we reported on an expedition to survey diversity in the deep sea off the coast of Southern California. The goal of the expedition was to document on video the diversity of deep sea diversity in the area and demonstrate the need to close the waters of the Southern California Bight to bottom trawl fishing which destroys […]
Diversity Expedition Update Read More »
Way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on a sanctuary off limits to fishing activity, scientists are learning the habits of marine life uninterrupted by humans. In a recent study, they’ve found that sharks commute in and out of the lagoons of Palmyra on a daily basis. Rush hour according to the researchers
Rush Hour in the Sanctuary Read More »
To help researchers better understand how much fish is being taken from the ocean, we’re developing ways to use our data for estimating the total potential catch of the global fishing fleet. It’s a big and a complex question to answer, partly because the source of our information, AIS, is limited. It doesn’t tell us
How Much Fish Can A Fisherman Fish? (and how we’re trying to find out) 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
Video Expedition Hopes to Capture and Protect Deep Sea Diversity off Southern California 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 »
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 »
For a gathering of enthusiastic supporters of ocean conservation, you can’t do better than the Peter Benchley Ocean Awards. Referred to as the “Academy Awards for the Ocean” the event honors individuals from a variety of disciplines for their outstanding leadership in ocean conservation.
Peter Benchley Ocean Awards: Global Fishing Watch Partners Win Big Read More »
