New Research Tool Allows Users to Visual Global Commercial Fishing Data

From a SkyTruth Blog Post:

SkyTruth is helping make the world’s oceans a little less mysterious and a great deal more transparent with the public beta release of Global Fishing Watch, announced today by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry at the Our Ocean Conference in Washington, DC.
In partnership with Oceana and Google, Global Fishing Watch was designed, developed, and tested by SkyTruth to enable users to map and analyze all of the world’s trackable commercial fishing activity. Global Fishing Watch is the world’s first dynamic, global, near real-time measure of fishing activity.

Read the Complete Blog Post
More From a Google Lat-Long Blog Post:

At any given time, there are about 200,000 vessels publicly broadcasting their location at sea through the Automatic Identification System (AIS). Their signals are picked up by dozens of satellites and thousands of terrestrial receivers. Global Fishing Watch runs this information — more than 22 million points of information per day — through machine learning classifiers to determine the type of ship (e.g., cargo, tug, sail, fishing), what kind of fishing gear (longline, purse seine, trawl) they’re using and where they’re fishing based on their movement patterns. To do this, our research partners and fishery experts have manually classified thousands of vessel tracks as training data to “teach” our algorithms what fishing looks like. We then apply that learning to the entire dataset — 37 billion points over the last 4.5 years — enabling anyone to see the individual tracks and fishing activity of every vessel along with its name and flag state.

Read the Complete Blog Post
Direct to Global Fishing Watch
Related Resources
VesselFinder and MarineTraffic are two of many services that provide (free and fee-based tools) access to the Automatic Identification System (AIS) via the web and mobile apps.

Filed under: Data Files, News, Patrons and Users