Global Fishing Watch Research Workshop

Global Fishing Watch is a new initiative to put together real time satellite data from global vessels navigating the oceans. As part of their research program, a series of workshops have been held in London, Rome and Spain this week with invited researchers and policy makers. Future Oceans Lab participated last Tuesday in Madrid in an enlightning session where GFW presented their project. Researchers from Spain discussed how we can use and provide insightful analysis of this rich dataset.We believe this data can be very important for understanding fishers behavior and potential adaptation to climate change impacts in fisheries.

Many people have already highlighted the importance of tracking fishing activity in real time, where a first paper in Science entitled ‘Ending hide and seek at the sea‘ shows the importance of transparency in fishing activity and the policy implications of having vessel operations under the radar. GFW was born as a partnership between google, skytruth and Oceana. More relevant research is yet to come as GFW keeps improving in data visualization, access and becomes its own independent organization.

*Participants, photo by David Kroodsma.