September 16, 2016 — Since 2014 a small group of environmentalists has been using satellites to track fishing vessels across the world’s oceans, alerting authorities when boats appear to violate protected marine areas. Now these watchdogs are opening their system to the public with an online mapping tool called Global Fishing Watch—and they are inviting anyone who can to put eyes on rogue fishers. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio, a longtime environmental activist, was set to formally unveil the tool on Thursday at a conference in Washington, D.C., organized by the U.S. State Department.
The project emerged from the Economist World Ocean Summit in 2014, when Paul Woods, chief technology officer of the tech-environmentalist group SkyTruth, met with Jacqueline Savitz, vice president for U.S. Oceans at the nonprofit organization Oceana, and Brian Sullivan, program manager of Google Earth Outreach. All three had been thinking about how to expose the global fishing fleet to public oversight, and in a conversation they sketched out a system to do just that. Within nine months they unveiled a working prototype. Two and a half years and 200 beta testers later, the system is being opened to everyone as a free service.
The hope, according to Savitz, is that governments and activists will use Global Fishing Watch to help improve the enforcement of fishing regulations—by seafood suppliers and customers to verify that fish are being caught sustainably; by fishing companies to demonstrate that they are complying with the rules; and by fisheries scientists to improve their estimates of fishing intensity and the effectiveness of fishery management programs.
The public monitoring system collects ship positions using digital Automatic Identification System (AIS) radio signals sent by large ships—not just fishing vessels but also cargo ships, cruise ships and others—primarily as a collision-avoidance measure. Those signals get picked up by spacecraft and terrestrial antennas operated by the satellite company Orbcomm and others, and accumulate in a database.
SkyTruth teamed up with engineers at Google to develop an algorithm that uses the speed, headings and other aspects of a ship’s motion to identify whether it is fishing or not. Vessels thought to be fishing are then cross-referenced to registries that can reveal their size, ownership and country of origin. As of last week, Woods says, the database includes 63,698 unique fishing vessels spending a total of about 14.5 million days at sea since 2012. On any given day Global Fishing Watch is tracking 10,000 to 20,000 fishing boats. Now nine terabytes and growing, the database tracks the movements of such ships from January 2012 onward. “We are adding about 22 million AIS messages per day,” Woods says. (Ship positions are delayed by 72 hours so as not to compete with Orbcomm’s sale of real-time data.)