Satellites find most of the world's industrial fishing fleet is not publicly tracked
Combining satellite images with vessel GPS records revealed activity at sea that neither source showed alone.
Picture made for ABUREAU.
In a paper published in Nature on 3 January 2024, researchers combined satellite imagery, vessel GPS data and deep learning to map industrial activity across the world's coastal waters from 2017 to 2021.
They found that 72 to 76% of the world’s industrial fishing vessels are not publicly tracked, much of that fishing around South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa, and that 21 to 30% of transport and energy vessel activity is missing from public tracking systems. The same map showed offshore wind turbines outnumbering oil structures by 2021.
The finding came from putting two data sets together. Each alone missed most of the picture; combined, they showed where fish are taken and who is doing it. That is the quiet value of data held in different places: joined with care, it can answer questions that matter for food, oceans and the people who depend on them.
