If you’ve grown accustomed to the idea that everything in our world is traceable—from airplanes to cell phones to personal browsing history and purchasing habits—it may seem like a no-brainer that we can use publicly broadcast Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals from ships at sea to find out where they are and what they’re doing. But in
Exploring a New World of Data with Team Member Aaron Roan Read More »
Imagine a vessel captain pulling into port with a cargo hold full of fish. The captain reports the vessel’s identity to the authorities, and his or her entire fishing voyage can be instantly viewed on a screen. The location in which the fish was caught can be verified right there at the dock. The fish
None of what we’re doing at Global Fishing Watch would be possible without the advancements in computing power that have occurred in recent years. The volume of data we work with would have been overwhelming in the past. In one random sample, we observed more than 127,000 vessels over a 24-hour period broadcasting the Automatic
Today, Global Fishing Watch is focused on tracking commercial-scale fishing fleets, because they are the ones required to carry Automatic Identification Systems that broadcast their information to satellites. But small, artisanal fishing vessels represent another side of the picture that can’t be ignored. Although they often employ low-tech, traditional fishing methods (especially in developing countries), small-boat subsistence fishers
New Partnership Expands Our View to Artisanal Fisheries Read More »
Just a few years ago the very idea of collecting billions of radio signals from ocean-going vessels all around the world and creating a global map of their activity in near-real time would have been unthinkable. But today’s cloud computing technology allows us to do amazing things with huge amounts of data.
Last Thursday, we kicked off the public launch of Global Fishing Watch with an announcement by actor and ocean advocate Leonardo DiCaprio at the Our Ocean Conference in Washington, DC. After the announcement, organizer and host Secretary of State John Kerry stopped by our demonstration in the conference hall to speak with the team and
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 »
At Global Fishing Watch, we hear it all the time: “Tracking commercial fishing vessels from satellites is such a great idea, and it seems so easy!” In fact, we’ve received a few questions from our readers asking us why this isn’t just a simple hack of publicly available data.
AIS and the Challenges of Tracking Vessels at Sea 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 complete darkness
Video Expedition Hopes to Capture and Protect Deep Sea Diversity off Southern California Read More »
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. In the ocean, our impacts are less tangible. Water covers 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 »
It’s been less than two years since we first demonstrated the Global Fishing Watch prototype in public, and the media coverage hasn’t stopped. Since announcing the prototype we’ve been featured in more than 100 publications on six continents, from the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal and International Business Times to media outlets in Russia, China,
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