From Wired by Wayt Gibbs
Illicit fishing goes on every day at an
industrial scale.
But large commercial fishers are about to get a new
set of overseers: conservationists—and soon the general public—armed
with space-based reconnaissance of the global fleet.
Crews on big fishing boats deploy an impressive arsenal of
technology—from advanced sonars to GPS navigation and mapping systems—as
they chase down prey and trawl the seabed.
These tools are so effective
that roughly a third of the world’s fisheries are now overharvested,
and more than three-quarters of the stocks that remain have hit their
sustainable limits,
according to the FAO.
For some species, most of the catch is unreported, unregulated, or flat-out illegal.
But now environmentalists are using
sophisticated technology of their own to peel away that cloak of
invisibility.
With satellite data from SpaceQuest and
financial and engineering support from Google, two environmental
activist groups have built the first global surveillance system that can
track large fishing vessels anywhere in the world.
A prototype of the system, called
Global Fishing Watch,
was unveiled today at the IUCN World Parks Congress in Sydney.
The tool
makes use of Google’s mapping software and servers to display the
tracks followed in 2012 and 2013 by some 25,000 ships that were either
registered as large commercial fishers or were moving in ways that
strongly suggest fishing activity.
The project was led by
Oceana, a marine conservation advocacy group, and the software was developed by
SkyTruth, a small non-profit that specializes in using remote sensing technologies to map environmentally sensitive activities such as
fracking and
flaring from oil and gas fields.
Although the system currently displays voyages from nearly a year ago,
“the plan is that we will build out a public release version that will
have near-real-time data,” said Jackie Savitz, Oceana’s VP for U.S.
oceans.
“Then you’ll actually be able to see someone out there fishing
within hours to days,” fast enough to act on the information if the
fishing is happening illegally, such as in a marine protected area.
US Coast Guard cutter Rush escorting the illegal fishing boat Da Cheng back to China.
US Coast Guard
The effort got its start at a conference in February, when Savitz sat down with Paul Woods of SkyTruth and Brian Sullivan of
Google’s Ocean and Earth Outreach program,
and the three discovered they had all been thinking along the same
lines: that the pieces were in hand to put eyes on the global fishing
fleet, or at least the bigger boats out there.
SpaceQuest now has four
satellites in orbit that continually pick up radio transmissions that
large ships send out as part of their automatic identification system
(AIS), broadcasts that include a unique ID number and the vessel’s
current position, speed, and heading.
Each packet of data is relatively
small, but the total AIS data stream is massive because it captures all
kinds of boats: naval warships, supertankers, barges, even some yachts.
To AIS a boat is a boat; there’s no easy way to tell which ones are
fishing.
So the group turned to Analyze Corp., where data scientists teamed up
with a former NOAA agent who worked for many years as an official
fishery observer to develop a heuristic algorithm that synthesizes input
such as rapid changes in trajectory, distances covered over the past 24
hours, long-term movements and port visits over months, and the
self-declared identity and class of the boat. “It combines all that and
spits out a weighted classification—essentially a probability that this
vessel is fishing at this particular spot and time,” Woods said.
Global Fishing Watch, a prototype tool unveiled today by Google and two conservation groups, maps the voyages of 25,000 large vessels during 2012 and 2013 and highlights where they engaged in fishing behavior (yellow and orange patches).
Users can zoom in to identify and track individual vessels and see where they may have engaged in unlicensed fishing in marine protected areas or other nations’ exclusive economic zones (light blue boundary lines).
Oceana/SkyTruth
The filter isn’t perfect, but it winnows
the data significantly.
From a 1-terabyte starting set of 3.7 billion
AIS messages intercepted from 111,000 vessels, the system extracted 300
million data points on about 25,000 boats that looked like they were
fishing.
“We were able to independently verify 3,125 of those as fishing
vessels,” Woods said.
He notes that the system does pick up some
non-fishing activity as false positives.
Arguably more important are the false negatives.
Global Fishing Watch
still misses most of the activity of the so-called dark fleet: smaller
fishing boats that aren’t required to use AIS, and rogue fishers who
turn their radios off before they enter restricted zones.
“That is an issue, but the cool thing is the model can detect erratic
AIS transmissions,” Savitz said. “If we see pings from a vessel every
hour for a month, then it goes silent, but suddenly comes back on weeks
later, we can pick that up and possibly trigger enforcement against them
for not transmitting as they are supposed to.”
Perhaps equally important, “we think this could be a tool for
positive reinforcement to reward good fishing behavior,” said Brian
Sullivan, a program manager with Google’s Ocean and Earth Outreach
program.
“If people can pay a premium for responsibly harvested fish
with confidence in the supply chain, that aligns the economic incentives
in a powerful way.”
The next step is to open up use of the tool to everyone and plug it
into a live stream of satellite data, so that ship tracks are current to
within a few days.
“The product really is not very far away from being a
public platform,” Woods said.
“Everything works in a web browser and on
Google servers in the cloud. We could launch something publicly in a
couple months if we secure funding to pay for the data feed.”
In the meantime, Oceana has begun using the tool internally to track
vessels that have already been blacklisted for fishing illegally, Savitz
said.
“We can see vessels that appear to be fishing in protected marine
areas. Government officials often know about this activity but don’t do
anything about it. We’ll use the tool to shine light on this activity
and produce public pressure for officials to actually do their jobs.”
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