Saving Seafood

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

Dr. Ray Hilborn: New Study on Fishing Effort ‘Does Not Provide Any New Insight’ on How Fishing Impacts Oceans

WASHINGTON — February 23, 2018 — A new study published in Science Magazine found that large-scale commercial fishing covers more than 55 percent of the world’s oceans. Today, Dr. Ray Hilborn, a respected fisheries expert and professor at the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, responded to the study in a statement, saying in part that it “does not provide any new insight on the impact of fishing on the oceans.”

“The media claims that this paper shows that fishing has a wider impact than previously known is simply wrong,” Dr. Hilborn said. “For most of the areas where there are data in this study, fish stocks are actually increasing and tuna populations are well documented and globally stable.”

Dr. Hilborn’s full statement is reproduced below:

This new study in Science using the AIS data does provide detailed information on fishing effort of specific vessels, but it does not provide anything new about the global pattern of fishing.  High seas fishing for tuna, which constitutes the majority of the “footprint” shown in the Science paper has been mapped for 40 years, and the widespread nature  of high seas tuna fishing is well known.  The footprint of bottom trawlers has been mapped in much finer scale already in many places, and the Science paper overestimates the proportion of the seabed impacted by trawls by 10 fold.

The media claims that this paper shows that fishing has a wider impact than previously known is simply wrong.   For most of the areas where there are data in this study,  fish stocks are actually increasing and tuna populations are well documented and globally stable.

The comparison to agriculture fails to note that the 50 million square kilometers under agriculture have destroyed the natural ecosystem as the plow or new pasture eliminates the native plants.   The areas fished, particularly for tunas, have changed very little.  Fishing does not impact the primary production (plants), and in very few cases does it impact the species that graze on the primary producers.  So the 50 million square kilometers of the earths’ surface that is used for agriculture is totally transformed,  most of the oceans that are being fished (high seas tuna)  have some changes in top predators abundance.

Certainly AIS data is very interesting and can let us look at specific things we could not do before, but it does not provide any new insight on the impact of fishing on the oceans.