Saving Seafood

Leo DiCaprio, Jeff Bezos, Blake Griffin part of Wildtype’s USD 100 million funding round

February 23, 2022 — Cell-based salmon start-up Wildtype announced on Wednesday, 23 February, it had raised USD 100 million (EUR 88 million) in its latest funding round.

San Francisco, California, U.S.A.-based Wildtype, which is creating sushi-grade cell-cultivated salmon for fine dining restaurants, said investments in the funding round came from Bezos Expeditions, S2G Ventures Oceans and Seafood Fund, Robert Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, Cargill, actor and environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio, and several prominent chefs and professional athletes. Private equity firm L Catterton led the funding round.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

Big Brother is watching at Global Fishing Watch

January 2, 2020 — In 2016, the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation joined with Google, Oceana and Environmental Defense, and other funding partners to create a mapping and data platform called, Global Fishing Watch. The system currently tracks over 65,000 fishing vessels worldwide. In November 2019, the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released the “Global Atlas of AIS-based Fishing Activity,” utilizing the data.

“With the data Global Fishing Watch provides, governments, fishery management organizations, researchers and the fishing industry can work together to rebuild fisheries and protect critical marine habitats,” De Caprio says, on the GFW website. It appears the FAO agrees.

Global Fishing Watch uses AIS and other tracking systems, such as government run vessels monitoring systems to follow the activities of large fishing vessels in near real time, and the UN is using that data in its report. At the start, the technology was intended to help nations to stop illegal fishing off their coasts, assist in certification of sustainably harvested seafood, and keep vessels out of marine protected areas.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Peru Commits to Make National Vessel Tracking Data Publicly Available

June 9, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The Peruvian government made a commitment to make its national vessel tracking data publicly available through Global Fishing Watch, which provides the first global view of commercial fishing activity.

The commitment was announced at The Ocean Conference hosted by the United Nations in New York City and is the result of Oceana’s collaboration with the Peruvian government to increase transparency of commercial fishing in Peru’s waters.

“Peru has committed to join Global Fishing Watch as a demonstration of transparency,” said Héctor Soldi, Vice Minister of Fisheries and Aquaculture for Peru’s Ministry of Production. “This technology platform, based on satellite data from fishing vessels to create a global vision of commercial fishing, enables anyone to follow fishing activity anywhere on the oceans. This is another demonstration of the Peruvian government’s commitment to fight illegal activities at sea and promote the sustainable use of the extraordinary marine productivity on our coastline. The Peruvian government intends to make the utmost effort to achieve the sustainable management of our fisheries in order to increase its contribution to nutrition and global food security.”

Global Fishing Watch uses public broadcast data from the Automatic Identification System (AIS), collected by satellite and terrestrial receivers, to show the movement of vessels over time. Global Fishing Watch uses this information to track vessel movement and classify it as “fishing” or “non-fishing” activity. While AIS is required for the largest vessels that catch a disproportionately large amount of fish, adding Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) data, which is required by some governments, to the Global Fishing Watch platform will provide the world with an even clearer view of fishing activity on our oceans. Together, AIS and VMS data offer the most accurate and comprehensive dataset. The announcement today will improve the information available to governments, fishery managers, seafood suppliers and buyers, journalists, researchers, nonprofit organizations and citizens around the world.

“Oceana has worked closely with the Peruvian government to convey the importance of transparency on our oceans, especially with regard to fishing activities,” said Patricia Majluf, Vice President of Oceana Peru. “Everyone should have access to the most comprehensive data available to best manage our fisheries and protect our ocean resources. Combined with Peru’s vessel tracking data, Global Fishing Watch will offer an invaluable depiction of what is happening in our waters. This is a huge step for Peru to emerge as a world leader in promoting transparency at sea.”

Funding partners for Global Fishing Watch include the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, Marisla Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Wyss Foundation, The Waterloo Foundation and Adessium Foundation. The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies and The Wyss Foundation are also funders of Oceana’s work in Peru.

“Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation supports efforts to restore balance to marine ecosystems across the globe,” said Justin Winters, Executive Director of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. “There are far too many areas of our oceans on the brink of total collapse because of illegal and overfishing activity. In order to implement solutions that protect these vulnerable habitats and marine life, the global community needs to see what is actually happening beyond the horizon. International leaders should follow the leads of Indonesia and Peru to prioritize transparency at sea.”

“We applaud the commitments by Peru and Indonesia to release their previously private vessel tracking data and encourage other countries to follow their lead,” said Jacqueline Savitz, Vice President for the United States and Global Fishing Watch at Oceana. “Together, with forward-thinking governments like these, we can bring greater transparency to the oceans. By publishing fishing data, governments and citizens can unite to help combat illegal fishing worldwide. With more eyes on the ocean, there are fewer places for illegal fishers to hide.”

“Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Vibrant Oceans Initiative supports a groundbreaking approach to reform both local and industrial fishing simultaneously. Our approach relies on and leverages transparency and accountability on the international, national and local levels,” said Antha Williams, Head of Environmental Programs at Bloomberg Philanthropies. “These announcements from two of the world’s largest fishing nations are a significant, encouraging step. We hope that other countries will follow their lead.”

“Around the world, we are seeing how countries that implement science-based policies are restoring the productivity of their fisheries and bringing life back to the seas,” said Molly McUsic, president of the Wyss Foundation. “These commitments from Peru and Indonesia are milestones in the global movement toward healthier oceans. These commitments will improve transparency, enable better management and decision-making, and yield economic and environmental benefits.”

This story originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

Dalhousie scientists play big role in Leonardo DiCaprio-funded website

September 20, 2016 — Dalhousie University researchers have played an important part in bringing to life a ‘revolutionary’ new website that allows anyone with internet to monitor and track commercial fishing activity around the world, as well as potentially identify illegal fishing.

Unveiled last week, Global Fishing Watch is a joint project between Google, digital mapping non-profit SkyTruth and ocean conservation group Oceana. It’s funded by the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation.

The website allows users to view a world map with more than 35,000 major fishing vessels moving in “near real time,” which is 72 hours from the present time.

Engineers behind Global Fishing Watch collaborated with researchers at Dalhousie University in the process of developing new ways to identify and hone in on fishing vessel activity, said Jacqueline Savitz, vice-president for U.S. and Global Fishing Watch at Oceana.

Global Fishing Watch will also eventually incorporate algorithms developed at Dalhousie, to provide a more complete picture of fishing activity on the high seas.

Read the full story at CBC News

Activists Open an Online Window onto the Global Fishing Fleet

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.)

Read the full story at Scientific American

US Navy Supports Sustainable Fisheries

September 16, 2016 — “You’re probably wondering why the Navy is up here today,” said Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, Oceanographer of the U.S. Navy, who moderated a panel regarding the sustainment of fisheries around the world’s oceans at a conference at the State Department attended by President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and actor Leonardo DiCaprio.

“We do much to support this [combating illegal unregulated unreported fishing] through the detection and the monitoring of illegal fishing using our very vast maritime domain awareness capabilities and surveillance assets on the sea, in the air and even under the sea,” Gallaudet said. “The Navy is very invested in this area. The whole key is, this will build our regional partnerships and advance collective maritime security.”
 
The panel was made up of fishery experts from around the world, who examined options that fishery management authorities may use to combat overfishing and mitigate adverse impacts on the broader marine environment.
 
The panel was part of a two-day conference titled Our Ocean that in addition to discussing sustainable fisheries focused on issues such as marine protected areas, marine pollution and climate-related impacts on the ocean.
 
Panelists for Fisheries for the Future included Minister of Marine Affairs and Fisheries of the Republic of Indonesia Susi Pudjiastuti, the Minister for Fisheries and Aquaculture Development of the Republic of Ghana the Honorable Sherry Ayuttey, investigative reporter for the New York Times Ian Urbana, Director of Global Fisheries and Aquaculture Monterey Bay Aquarium Jennifer Kemmerly and Executive Director for the Community and Biodiversity Association Jorge Torre.
 

How a spy satellite could cut down on illegal fishing

September 15, 2016 — Environmentalists hope a new satellite service that scans the earth’s seas from space in search of illegal fishing activity can act as a watchdog service, holding those who overfish or intrude on protected areas accountable for the adverse effects of their actions.

The Google-powered technology, which has been named Global Fishing Watch, monitors more than 35,000 commercial fishing vessels using public broadcast data and is available to anyone with an internet connection, The Washington Post reported. Such information allows governments, journalists, and citizens to track the movement of boats, making it easier for nations with limited resources to apprehend the fishermen illegally depleting their oceans.

“We have to find a way to enforce [fishing laws],” Secretary of State John Kerry told The Washington Post. “We have to find a way to monitor it. And that’s very difficult in vast oceans with resources that are [limited]. We’re trying to create accountability where there is very little.”

Actor and environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio will unveil the new technology Thursday at a conference for ocean preservation in Washington, D.C.

Read the full story at the Christian Science Monitor