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 »
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 »
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 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 »
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,
Making Headlines: We’re On to Something! Read More »
