Saving Seafood

‘No place to hide’ for illegal fishing fleets as surveillance satellites prepare for lift-off

September 3, 2019 — The prospect of monitoring every vessel at sea in real time has moved a step closer to reality as a new generation of surveillance satellites takes to the skies.

The satellites are being launched by a small number of private companies with the potential to transform the monitoring of marine fisheries. One of those companies is Capella Space, which will launch a constellation of 36 surveillance satellites into orbit starting in December, following successful trials with a pilot satellite.

Capella’s “minibar-sized satellites” are equipped with synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) sensors, which ping signals down to Earth and use the information bouncing back to generate radar images. Though radar pictures lack the detail of optical images and cannot currently be used to identify specific vessels, they can detect the presence of any ship in the ocean, day or night, whatever the weather.

Read the full story at Mongabay

Indonesia makes its fishing fleet visible to the world through Global Fishing Watch

June 8, 2017 — This week, at the United Nation’s Ocean Conference, the Republic of Indonesia becomes the first nation ever to publish Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) data revealing the location and activity of its commercial fishing fleet. The new data being made public on the Global Fishing Watch public mapping platform reveals commercial fishing in Indonesian waters and areas of the Indian Ocean where it had previously been invisible to the public and other nations.

Susi Pudjiastuti, the Minister of Fisheries and Marine Affairs for the Republic of Indonesia, is taking a bold step toward increasing in her country’s . Today she urges other nations to do the same.

“Illegal fishing is an international problem, and countering it requires cross border cooperation between countries,” says Minister Susi. “I urge all nations to join me in sharing their vessel monitoring data with Global Fishing Watch. Together, we can begin a new era in transparency to end illegal and unreported fishing.”

Also at the UN Ocean’s Conference, Global Fishing Watch has committed to host any country’s VMS data, calling on other governments to follow Indonesia’s lead. “We believe publicly shared VMS will become a powerful new standard for transparent operation in commercial fishing,” says Paul Woods, Global Fishing Watch CEO and Chief Technology Officer for SkyTruth, a founding partner of Global Fishing Watch along with Oceana and Google. “SkyTruth has been collaborating with the Indonesian government for the past two years to really understand their VMS data and find new ways for VMS to enhance their fisheries management.”

Working closely with Oceana toward a united goal of transparency at sea, Peru becomes the first nation to follow Indonesia’s lead. Vice Minister for Fisheries and Aquaculture, Hector Soldi, announced Peru’s intent to publicly share their VMS data in Global Fishing Watch.

“We applaud the commitments made by Peru and Indonesia to publish their previously private vessel tracking data and encourage other countries to follow their lead,” said Jacqueline Savitz, Senior Vice President for the United States and Global Fishing Watch at Oceana. “Together, with forward-thinking governments like these, we can bring even greater transparency to the oceans. By publishing fishing data and using Global Fishing Watch, 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.”

Read the full story at Phys.org

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