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Author Topic: Google's Global Fishing Watch  (Read 1236 times)

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Google's Global Fishing Watch
« on: June 05, 2017, 07:56:06 PM »

Google is doing some pretty cool stuff with their technology - using their wealth of information and algorithms to offer insight into illegal fishing around the world.
https://environment.google/projects/fishing-watch/

From their home page:
In June 2015 a fishing vessel was spotted in the Phoenix Island Protected Area (PIPA) of Kiribati, an island nation dispersed over more than a million square miles of the Pacific. The government sent an enforcement vessel out from the capital on the four-day journey to investigate the remote region.

PIPA, the world’s largest UNESCO World Heritage marine site, had recently transitioned to a complete no-take protected area, right in the middle of some of the world’s most fertile commercial tuna waters. But when the I-Kiribati reached the boat, the captain of the multimillion-dollar commercial vessel denied that he was fishing and invited them to take his company to court, believing Kiribati had neither the evidence nor the resources to prosecute.

He believed wrong. After being escorted back to port, the captain was shown a visualization of his vessel’s movements. Seeing his ship’s distinct circling patterns in the no-take area, he quickly decided to settle.


Here is a link to the map. You can choose your time frame to view all "assumed" fishing in a specific area - up to three days before your search. Pretty cool, and if you log in you can track the movements of specific boats. Ucluelet is a pretty cool search area with lots going on and a few boats cruising up to Port Alberni to unload.
http://globalfishingwatch.org/map/
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"Perhaps fishing is, for me, only an excuse to be near rivers"
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