By providing the first free global view of commercial fishing*, Global Fishing Watch delivers a powerful and unprecedented tool that can help to rebuild fish stocks and protect our oceans, which are threatened by global overfishing, illegal fishing and habitat destruction.
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Available at GlobalFishingWatch.org, the technology aims to offer a crowdsourced 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 $31 billion, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
Oscar award winning actor, Leonardo Di Caprio recently unveiled free technology that would allow its users to spy on global fishing practices across the globe. “Fish populations have already plummeted by 90 percent for some species within the last generation, and the human population is only growing larger”.
The interactive tool, which uses satellite tracking and data broadcast by the Automatic Identification System on board shipping vessels, uses machine learning to determine the types of ships in any given area, the kind of fishing gear they are using, and where they’re fishing based on their movement patterns. Some of the largest fish, including Swordfish and Tuna, are 10% below to their historical level and are near for Extinction.
“Working with Oceana and Google has enabled us to take a good idea and build it into something that will improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the planet”, said John Amos, President and Founder of SkyTruth.
Overfishing, as well as illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU) are a worldwide problem and the Safe Ocean Network, an initiative announced by the USA government in 2015, focuses on enhancing the collaboration between countries and institutions to fight them.
“If you can’t see it and can’t measure it, you are not going to care about it and it is not going to get solved.”
So far, the project has cost more than ten million dollars, taking more than three years to construct.
Although the delay means that any criminals will not be nabbed instantaneously, advocates say the technology will open the world’s waters to public watchdogs in a way that has never been done before. “We’re hoping it will be useful to a lot of different sectors”. We can also collect data of a particular area by zooming.
For instance, users could zero in on a marine protected area and see if any boat tracks have crossed into waters where they should not have been. Once identified as fishing ships, the vessels are cross-referenced to registries for information on their size, ownership and country of origin and then logged on the database, which already has 63.698 unique entries.
Vessels can be tracked by name or by country, or by traffic inside exclusive economic zones. The organizations that partnered to develop it, which include the marine-advocacy group Oceana and West Virginia-based nonprofit SkyTruth, say the free platform will help governments, journalists and everyday citizens monitor roughly 35,000 commercial fishing vessels almost in real time. All commercial US flagged fishing vessels over 65 feet in length and all European Union flagged fishing vessels over 15 meters (49.2 feet) in length are required to have them.
Global Fishing Watch is the result of a partnership between Oceana, SkyTruth and Google.
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AIS can be turned off if the boat operator is doing something illegal, but Savitz said that such an on-off action would likely be apparent by tracing the boat’s appearing and disappearing tracks. The company also agreed to pay the government another $1 million grant as a special “goodwill arrangement”. He runs “Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation”.
