John Hocevar is the Oceans Campaign Director for Greenpeace USA. His team has been using Global Fishing Watch to help focus their attention on specific areas within known hotspots of illegal activity. John is a co-author on a paper in the current issue of the journal Marine Policy that presents arguments for a moratorium on
Octavio Aburto of Scripps Institution of Oceanography (left) and his colleagues, Juan Mayorga of UC Santa Barbara and Enric Sala of Pristine Seas are using Global Fishing Watch to understand the economic impacts of establishing a new Marine Protected Area in Mexican waters. [UPDATE: On October 5, 2017, the Mexican government announced its intent to expand the Revillagigedo marine park into
Where Tourism and Tuna Overlap: How Global Fishing Watch is Informing Policy Discussions Read More »
5 years, over 86,000 potential transshipments In early 2017, we released an original report based on analysis of our data that revealed remarkable new insights about what goes on between fishing vessels at sea. The machine learning platform we developed found that over the past five years, there were more than 86,000 potential cases in which fishing
86,490 Points on a Map: All Potential Transshipments Read More »
Today we published our initial research on transshipment at sea. Transshipment at sea is where a fishing vessel offloads its catch to a refrigerated cargo vessel (or “reefer”) far from port. You can download a copy of our report via this link. The image above was created by our data scientist Nate Miller, who has spent
It’s been just over five months since Global Fishing Watch launched publicly, and this week, we hope to make another splash by not just mapping global fishing activity, but by providing an unprecedented view of very specific activity by a very specific class of vessels around the world. Today, at the Economist World Ocean Summit
Transshipment: A Global Footprint Never Seen Before Read More »
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 22, 2017 Contacts: Kimbra Cutlip, [email protected] +1.443.871.1632 David Kroodsma, [email protected], +1.415.656.7540 Mara Harris, [email protected] Hidden No More: The First-Ever Global View of Transshipment in the Commercial Fishing Industry Transshipment, the transfer of goods from one boat to another, is a major pathway for illegally caught and unreported fish to enter the global
The First-Ever Global View of Transshipment in Commercial Fishing Read More »
In 2016, 33 countries agreed to establish a global network of scientifically supported Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) that will increase the amount of ocean area protected from the current 2 percent to 10 percent by the year 2020. MPAs either restrict human activity such as fishing, or they prohibit it all together. But the question
New research published in the journal Biological Conservation sheds light on the contentious debate surrounding large Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) that restrict or prohibit fishing and other activities. By combining established shark tracking methods with the publicly available Global Fishing Watch platform that allows anyone to track fishing activity anywhere in the world, scientists have demonstrated that
Tracking fishing vessels and sharks reveals protection for large mobile animals Read More »
The no-take marine reserve Motu Maha surrounds the Aukland Islands. Marine protected areas (MPAs) are among the best tools we have for conserving biodiversity in the oceans, protecting vulnerable marine life, and providing places of refuge for fish stocks. But do they work? Can vast areas of ocean really be regulated? And if so, what
MPA Survey Hints at Complexity of Marine Conservation Read More »
As a Senior Program Manager for Google Ocean & Earth Outreach Brian Sullivan is Google’s lead on Global Fishing Watch. Over the years, he has managed digital divide programs in West Africa, toted Google’s Street View technology through remote areas of the world (including under water), and worked on multiple projects that help non-profits use
It is the quintessential herald of a fishing vessel on the horizon: a swarming congregation of seabirds, gliding and diving in the distance, sun glinting on white wings as a cacophony of cries echoes across the water. Picturesque as it may be, the scene represents one of the largest threats to the survival of many
Mystery Solved: Where Albatrosses and Fishing Vessels Meet at Sea Read More »
Usually when you want to protect something, you have to know where it is. That sounds like common sense, but when it comes to protecting highly migratory species in the oceans, scientists, conservationists and resource managers are often flying blind. Marine animals such as sharks, turtles, whales and large mid-ocean fish like tuna often traverse
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
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. In the ocean, our impacts are less tangible. Water covers more
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
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