Global Fishing Watch is a free web-based system for public monitoring of fishing vessels that provides almost real-time data of their location and will facilitate the detection and prevention of illegal fishing.
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“We will be able to see a lot of information about who is fishing where”, said Jacqueline Savitz, vice president for USA oceans at Oceana, adding that the platform will help “revolutionize the way the world views commercial fishing”. Journalists and everyday citizens will be able to identify behavior that may be related to illegal fishing or overfishing.
It aims to offer a crowd sourced solution to the problem of illegal fishing, which accounts for up to 35 per cent of the global wild marine catch and causes yearly losses of $23.5 billion, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The free tool, still in its beta phase, lets anybody monitor and track activities of large commercial fishing vessels in near real time.
The tracker is regularly updated to show vessel tracks and fishing activity from January 1, 2012 through the present, although it operates on a three-day delay.
Leonardo DiCaprio, the actor/activist, unveiled Global Fishing Watch last week at the third annual Our Ocean Conference in Washington, D.C.
Sonia Strobel, co-founder and managing director of a local Vancouver fishery, Skipper Otto’s, says she is hopeful the app can help make fishing more sustainable. All industry participants, from governments to private citizens to industry leaders, will be given new insights on how to “visualize, track, and share information” about fishing.
The FAO was also quoted as saying that Global Fishing Watch is also created to crack down on overfishing, as about two-thirds of the world’s high-sea fish stocks are depleted or, at the very least, overfished.
Armed with new global datasets and access to massive cloud computing resources, leading scientific institutions around the world are collaborating in the Global Fishing Watch Research Program to model economic, environmental, policy and climate change implications on fisheries. Shipping vessels can turn off their AIS Trackers or refuse to disclose their location.
Global Fishing Watch gathers data from vessels’ Automatic Identification System (AIS), which boat captains use to broadcast their position, course and speed to nearby ships, base stations and satellites.
The movie star’s foundation contributed $6 million of the overall $10.3 million required to get the Global Fishing Watch up and running. Any/all Global Fishing Watch information about “apparent fishing activity” should be considered an estimate and must be relied upon exclusively at your own risk.
The tool has already helped catch one commercial fishing company red-handed.
The Phoenix Islands Protected Area is a “no-take” Marine Protected Area, which prohibits all fishing and extraction measures within its boundaries, year-round. “We’re hoping it will be useful to a lot of different sectors”.
Meanwhile, the USA has joined more than 20 countries in creating 40 new marine sanctuaries around the world to protect oceans from the threat of climate change and pollution.
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The map was created by Google Earth Outreach, a part of Google that uses the company’s infrastructure to develop environment-friendly tools and projects.
