Tracking fisherman to track fish: How scientists are using vessel monitoring systems to better understand the oceans

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — The biggest challenge with studying the world’s fish population is simple: fish live underwater.

You can’t easily easily spot them from land or even from space with satellites so getting a sense for where they are when, where they are going, and how many of them are left is really hard.

But one non-profit, Global Fishing Watch, is now trying a cutting-edge technique that they hope will help better track the movements of the world’s fish population: they are tracking the world’s fishermen.

The group leverages positioning data from Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponders that are required on large vessels, primarily to prevent collisions.

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But taking that data and adding in a powerful dose of Artificial Intelligence, the group’s chief scientist David Kroodsma claims they are able to paint a global picture of fishing fleets.

“What we do is we take all the GPS positions of all the boats in the world. You’re talking about a database of 100 or well over 100 bazillion, 100 billion, GPS positions. And we use machine learning to determine what types of boat they are, what they’re doing, if they’re fishing boats, when they’re fishing,” Kroodsma explains.

And if a ship flips off the transponder for any reason, a maneuver known as going dark, Kroodsma and his fellow trackers double down.

“Millions of gigabytes of satellite imagery to and apply AI to that to detect vessels and then determine which vessels are broadcasting which ones or not, to come up with that larger picture of where activity on the ocean is happening,” he adds.

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The result is a global view of the world’s oceans that’s becoming incredibly detailed with each advance in technology.

Global Fishing Watch makes the data publicly available on their website and says their primary goal is to help better monitor the world’s oceans and prevent environmental threats like overfishing.

At the same time, these powerful technologies are also expanding the group’s role and becoming valuable in a new and different way.

“We wondered if we could use it to understand what’s happening to the ecosystem as the climate changes,” explains Heather Welch, a marine science researcher at U.C. Santa Cruz.

Instead of tracking fishing fleets, Welch and her colleagues are interested in tracking the fish themselves. Tuna to be exact.

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To do that, they’re leveraging data from a different tracking system known as VMS, for vessel monitoring system. It’s how the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration helps monitor fishing in U.S. waters.

“Fisheries data, ecological data is time consuming to collect. It’s often people going out in planes, on vessels, on scuba. That takes a lot of time and money. So we’re looking for this sort of data stream that’s available already and available very quickly to provide us those inferences,” says Welch.

In a newly published study, Welch’s team treated the fishing fleet data like a floating sensor system, comparing location data from the fleets to the migration of albacore Tuna during marine heat waves, sometimes known as ocean Blobs.

They say the technique was six times as successful at predicting population shifts compared to traditional research techniques, like measuring ocean temperatures.

They believe the data could help provide an early warning, for disruptions in fishing and the broader marine environment.

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“You know we think about the blob, that 2014 to 2016 heat wave is a prominent example that had a lot of harmful algal blooms that got into the shellfish and crab fisheries. Those shut down. So that was an economic loss for the fishery,” says Welch.

“At the same time, we had whales in new locations and different timing, particularly humpbacks are being entangled at alarming rates. So the trickle down effects are broad and very diverse.”

The team hopes to extend the technique to open-source monitoring systems like the one created by Global Fishing Watch, taking advantage of an expanding technology that’s now being shared worldwide.

“And the idea is that because now you have all the information, you can now improve how you manage the oceans. Right? And that is that’s the hope.”