Saving Seafood

Global Fishing Watch, SkyTruth warn of vessels falsifying coordinates

June 21, 2024 — Nonprofit organizations Global Fishing Watch (GFW) and SkyTruth have reported that vessels on the world’s oceans may be using constantly improving technology to falsify and scramble their automatic identification system (AIS) coordinates, potentially carrying out illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing through the use of such technology.

One of the first instances that alerted the organizations to this fact was a Russian-flagged tanker vessel that was found to be broadcasting false AIS coordinates on at least two separate occasions.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

NOAA making vessel traffic data more accessible to public

April 28, 2023 — Escalating debates over siting offshore wind energy projects has made stakeholders reliant on Coast Guard vessel traffic data to scope out potential conflicts. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been making improvements and new online tools to open that knowledge to a wider public.

The Automatic Identification System that tracks vessel movements with transponders on ships has helped create an “AIS database of 30 billion-plus vessel locations has become the go-to resource for maritime planners and ocean geospatial tech experts,” according to a recent summary from NOAA.

That data is a base for a NOAA website, MarineCadastre.gov . Cadastre is the ancient system of metes-and-bounds surveying of real estate on land.

For the ocean, NOAA developed the tool AccessAIS to help users access AIS data and more from MarineCadastre.gov on birds, economics, boundaries, federal regulations and other factors in planning.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

At least 6% of global fishing ‘probably illegal’ as ships turn off tracking devices

November 3, 2022 — Up to 6% of global fishing activity is hidden because commercial vessels disable their tracking systems, a practice that can be used to hide illegal fishing, according to a new study.

Ships use automatic identification systems (AIS), tracking beacons that enable them to be located on global shipping maps. Researchers applied a machine learning algorithm to a dataset of fishing vessel activity compiled by the non-profit Global Fishing Watch, which included more than 3.7bn AIS messages from fishing vessels between 2017 and 2019.

They discovered geographical hotspots for ships disabling their trackers, including west Africa, the coast of Argentina and the north-west Pacific – suggesting these are locations where illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing is likely to be taking place.

Read the full article at the Guardian

Huffman, Graves get AIS provision included in Coast Guard bill

March 4, 2022 — Two U.S. representatives who have worked across the aisle to combat illegal fishing practices succeeded on Wednesday, 2 March, in amending a Coast Guard funding bill to include a requirement for more fishing vessels to install tracking systems.

U.S. Reps. Jared Huffman (D-California) and Garret Graves (R-Louisiana) say requiring boats that are at least 65 feet in length to have automatic identification systems (AIS) technology on board. A grant program that includes USD 5 million (EUR 4.5 million) would be made available to help boat owners purchase the equipment.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

Scientists pen letter to Congress urging SIMP expansion

December 16, 2021 — More than 100 scientists signed a letter sent to Congress on Monday, 13 December, urging lawmakers to ensure that all seafood products imported into the United States are caught using legal means.

Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing is often associated with human trafficking and other human rights abuses, and distant-water fishing forces vessel owners and operators to extend trips to “achieve a sizeable catch,” the university professors, research fellows, and scientists claimed in the two-page letter. In order to get that kind of catch, some operators will use forced labor and harvest fishing stocks beyond allowable limits, they alleged.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

US Representative Jared Huffman defends AIS requirement in IUU bill that fishing industry finds redundant

September 30, 2021 — Nearly 130 members of the U.S. fishing industry signed a letter sent earlier this month to the top members of the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees fishing policies, expressing concerns about a bill they said would create technological redundancies, add to their costs, and raise privacy concerns.

The industry members told U.S. Reps. Jared Huffman (D-California) and Cliff Bentz (R-Oregon), in the 14 September letter they oppose a proposed requirement in H.R. 3075, also known as the Illegal Fishing and Forced Labor Prevention Act, that would mandate automatic identification systems (AIS) be used to track fishing activities in both U.S. waters and the open seas.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

129 Fishing Industry Representatives Ask Congress to Oppose ‘Duplicative’ New Vessel Monitoring Requirements

September 27, 2021 — 129 fishing industry representatives have written to Congress asking them to reconsider a bill that would require all fishing vessels to use Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) in U.S. waters and on the high seas, citing redundancy with other monitoring systems, cost and privacy concerns.

The letter, organized by the Saving Seafood Coalition and delivered to the House Subcommittee on Water, Oceans, and Wildlife, concerns H.R. 3075, the Illegal Fishing and Forced Labor Prevention Act. This legislation would require commercial fishing vessels to install AIS systems; however, most vessels already use Vessel Monitoring Systems (VMS) to track their locations. The letter notes several reasons why vessel operators prefer VMS to AIS, specifically privacy concerns associated with adopting AIS.

Current VMS hardware, unlike AIS, is based on secured end-to-end transmissions. AIS relies on VHF radio signals, which are susceptible to interception and risk being spoofed. Additionally, AIS data can be seen by other vessels and competitors, undermining privacy and data security that up until now has been an important part of NOAA’s vessel monitoring and data collection policies.

“We were concerned by the viewpoint expressed by Rep. Ed Case [D-HI], a

cosponsor of the bill, that no one ‘fishing in [United States] waters has an inherent right to privacy’ and that VMS data should not be considered proprietary,” the letter states. “That viewpoint is contrary to twenty-seven years of agency policy set forth by NOAA Administrative Order 216-100, which created a strict regime of controls to protect the privacy of data collected by the agency for purposes including the regulation and conservation of our fisheries.”

As noted in the letter, this position is shared by Janet Coit, who was recently confirmed as Assistant Administrator for NOAA Fisheries. In earlier written testimony, she stated:

“[Section 501 of H.R. 3075] is duplicative of existing Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) requirements since it would require those vessels already equipped with VMS to carry AIS without significant benefits. AIS is primarily a collision avoidance system, but VMS are more effective for tracking fishing vessel movement and effort, are less susceptible to tampering, and have better tools for two-way communications with vessels.”

Read the letter here

 

Study on economics of fishing on the high seas

June 7, 2018 — As much as 54 percent of the high seas fishing industry would be unprofitable at its current scale without large government subsidies, according to a new study by researchers from the National Geographic Society; the University of California, Santa Barbara; Global Fishing Watch; the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia; and the University of Western Australia. The research, published today in the open-access journal Science Advances, found that the global cost of fishing in the high seas ranged between $6.2 billion and $8 billion USD in 2014. Profits from this activity range between a loss of $364 million and a profit of $1.4 billion USD.

The high seas—marine waters beyond national jurisdiction—cover 64 percent of the ocean’s surface and are dominated by a small number of fishing countries, which reap most of the benefits of fishing this internationally shared area. While the environmental impacts of fishing on the high seas are well studied, a high level of secrecy around distant-water fishing had previously precluded reliable estimates of the economic costs and benefits of high seas fishing. However, newly compiled satellite data and machine learning have revealed a far more accurate picture of fishing effort across the globe at the level of individual vessels.

“The reason most fleets continue to operate in the high seas is that they receive government subsidies. Without subsidies and the forced labor some of them are known for, fishing would be unprofitable in over half of the high seas fishing grounds,” said Enric Sala, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and lead author of the study.

Using Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) and Vessel Monitoring Systems (VMS), the researchers were able to track the individual behavior, fishing activity and other characteristics of 3,620 vessels in near-real time. Combining this information with the global catch data from the University of British Columbia’s Sea Around Us project, the team was then able to determine how much effort the vessels expended, how large their catch was, and how much profit the catch generated.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Satellite location data helps fight illegal fishing, even as vessels still evade detection

April 12, 2018 — At least every 30 seconds, more than 70,000 fishing vessels responsible for most of the world’s catch broadcast automatic identification systems (AIS) signaling their identity, location, and speed.

The AIS systems were originally designed to help large vessels avoid collisions on the open ocean, but in recent years, conservation groups and fisheries enforcement have used those signals for a new purpose: spotting vessels that might be fishing illegally.

But this technique is far from watertight. Oceana, a conservation group, has documented millions of instances since 2012 of vessels going dark by turning off public trackers.

“Vessels disabling their public tracker is a common occurrence and is happening in all corners of the world — we are just now beginning to understand how widespread the practice is,” Beth Lowell, senior campaign director for illegal fishing and seafood fraud at Oceana, told SeafoodSource.

Vessels might turn off tracking for multiple reasons, many of them legitimate, such as evading pirates. But when a vessel turns off location broadcasting near marine reserves and other areas where fishing is limited or illegal, it raises questions, Lowell said.

For instance, Oceana documented a Panamanian vessel on the west side of the Galapagos Marine Reserve that seemed to disappear for 15 days before reappearing on the east side. Meanwhile, an Australian vessel’s AIS signals were shut off near Heard Island and the McDonald Islands Marine Reserve 10 times in one year, and a Spanish vessel went dark near The Gambia’s national waters repeatedly.

Read the full story at Seafood Source