Sleuths of the High Seas

May 1, 2017

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Photo: Courtesy David Kroodsma

From smuggling to piracy, the high seas have long hidden any number of unsavory activities, unscrupulous fishing high among them. An estimated 20 percent of the global seafood catch falls in a shady category termed “illegal, unreported and unregulated.”

The off-the-books behavior—a test to world food security—is of course enabled by the vastness of the oceans. “Historically, whatever is over the horizon is completely out of sight,” says David Kroodsma, ’01, MS ’03, research project manager for SkyTruth, a nonprofit that works to protect the environment by making it more visible.

New technology developed by SkyTruth in coordination with Google and Oceana, another environmental nonprofit, is giving unprecedented transparency to what’s happening far from shore. It provides anyone with an online connection a window on tens of thousands of ships fishing the high seas and national waters.

The interactive tool, called Global Fishing Watch, uses a vast amount of data gleaned from ships’ automatic identification systems (AIS)—originally intended as navigation safety aids—to track much of the global fishing fleet in action. Its algorithms parse the ships that exhibit behavior associated with fishing from, say, cargo or naval vessels.

Launched publicly last September, the free platform has since helped the tiny Pacific nation of Kiribati, which has only one patrol vessel, catch a 230-foot purse seiner illegally fishing in a no-take marine protected area. The ship’s owner was fined $1 million and agreed to pay another $1 million as a “goodwill” gesture.

The tool’s greatest immediate impact may not be in enforcement, however, but in helping scientists and marine managers better understand what is happening in the immenseness of the oceans and to study the interplay between fishing and fish, what Kroodsma calls the “biggest tragedy of the commons.”

One of the most exciting consequences is the capacity to cross-check fishing activity with other tracking data from animals like sharks, says Douglas McCauley, a marine biologist at UC-Santa Barbara. From that, scientists can make better recommendations about how to manage and coordinate conservation and use of the oceans. “For marine scientists, Global Fishing Watch has transformed the problem from having too little data about fishing activity to having too much—a super problem to have,” says McCauley, PhD ’11.

Important pieces of the coding behind the service, including its ability to decode raw data from the ships, were created by Google’s Kurt Schwehr, ’94. A former spacecraft engineer for NASA, Schwehr worked on a Martian lander before deciding Earth was the planet he preferred to study.

Kurt Schwehr Photo: Kurt Schwehr

Schwehr looks for projects with the power to simultaneously promote environmental benefit and economic gain.

He’s less interested in Global Fishing Watch’s ability to serve as a stick for bad actors, who can find ways to cloak their location by turning off their AIS, than he is in its use as a carrot for the majority of fishing outfits doing things the right way. They should be able to charge a premium at market, he says, much as “cage-free” or “organic” farmers do.

“You can go back to shore and say, ‘Hey, I followed my permit,’ ” Schwehr says. “ ‘I was doing everything right. You should buy my fish.’ ”


Sam Scottformerly a senior writer at Stanford, is now based in Toronto.

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