World's fishing fleets mapped from orbit

By Jonathan Amos BBC Science Correspondent

BBC 23rd February 2018

It's another demonstration of the power of Big Data - of mining a huge batch of statistics to see patterns
of behaviour that were simply not apparent before.

Computers have crunched 22 billion identification messages transmitted by sea-going vessels to map fishing
activity around the globe.
The analysis reveals that more than 55% of the world's oceans are subject to industrial exploitation.
By area, fishing's footprint is now over four times that of agriculture. That's an astonishing observation given
that fisheries provide only 1.2% of global caloric production for human food consumption.

The investigation shows clearly that the biggest influences on this activity are not environmental - whether it is
summer or winter, or whether there is an El Niño or fish are migrating, for example. Rather, the major
controlling factors are very largely political and cultural. "You'd think that fishing activity would follow some
natural pulse of the seasons, but in fact that's secondary to whether it's a weekend or not, or whether there's a
moratorium, or a public holiday," says David Kroodsma from Global Fishing Watch, which led the
study published in Science Magazine. "Because fishing is an industrial activity tied to politics and culture, this
is actually a positive message because it shows we have a lot of human agency in the way we fish the oceans,
and it's entirely within our power to change things," he told BBC News.

Kroodsma and colleagues have been playing with the data coming from the transponders that all large vessels
are now mandated to carry. This Automatic Identification System (AIS) means each boat will push out
information every few seconds about its position, course, and speed. These messages can be detected from
space by satellites, and recent years have seen increasing numbers of spacecraft launched just to track what's
happening on the high seas.

Kroodsma's team looked at the data from 2012 to 2016. It encompasses the messages from over 70,000
vessels. That's far too many boats and too much data for individuals to comb through. So, the team has trained
algorithms to do the work instead - to recognise in the movement of the vessels behaviours such as whether
they actually have gear in the water and what sort of gear that might be. Nets or longlines, for example.

The team is able to produce "heat maps" to illustrate where fishing activity is most intense - such as in the
northeast Atlantic and northwest Pacific, as well as in nutrient-rich regions off South America and West
Africa.
Remarkably, it is the fleets from just five countries
(China, Spain, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea) that
account for more than 85% of observed fishing effort on
the high seas, ie away from their exclusive economic
zones.
The team says that over the course of the study period,
the analysis recorded over 37 million hours of fishing. In
that time, vessels consumed 20 billion kilowatt hours of
energy and travelled a total of more than 460 million
kilometres. That's 600 times the distance to the Moon and
back.
Longline fishing in the open ocean, for species such as
tuna, shark and billfish, was the most widespread activity
globally, detected in 45% of the ocean. "What's most
exciting is what comes next," says David Kroodsma.
"We can now ask questions that we have the data to
answer. Where are different species at risk because of
bycatch? Because you can now see the overlap between
species' ranges and fishing effort.
"Or, how do subsidies affect fishing? Or, do fisherman
respond more to [fuel] prices than to some type of regulation?
"Or, what parts of the ocean need more protection?
We can now have much more informed discussion."

What the team has produced is not a complete

picture simply because AIS is not on every boat. The
smallest vessels do not have to carry it, and of course
for those that do - but wish to hide their illegal
activity - they can switch it off.
But the analysis captures the majority of activity, and
on the high seas, where only the largest vessels
operate, it is probably missing very little.
Commenting on the study, Elvira Poloczanska, from
the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven,
Germany, said AIS had become a powerful new tool.
"Emerging applications of AIS data include fleet and
cargo tracking, national fishing fleet monitoring, and
maritime security," she told Science Magazine.
"For example, AIS data is yielding information on
maritime trade routes and shipping corridors and on trade flows for decision-making, enabling assessments of
the contribution of ship exhaust emissions to air pollution, and allowing reduced fishing activity in the
exclusive economic zones of many island states - information relevant to conservation planning."
Global Fishing Watch has all the data from the study available for download. It can also be accessed through
the Google Earth Engine