Global Fishing Watch tracks ocean poachers with the help of AI

Artificial intelligence is the beating heart at the center of delivery robots, autonomous cars, and, as it turns out, ocean ecology trackers. In a blog post on Friday, Global Fishing Watch, a platform founded by Google, Skytruth, and Oceana that monitors fishing activity around the globe, announced the addition of two new data layers to increase "transparency" and "awareness" around overfishing. One of the new layers tracks transshipment, a method whereby one fishing vessel offloads its catch to another, refrigerated ship at sea. It's often used to combine illicitly caught fish with legal seafood, and it usually takes place in international waters, making it difficult for authorities to track. Working from a database of 300,000 ships across 12 categories, Global Fishing Watch trained machine learning algorithms to identify when a fishing vessel is docked alongside a refrigerator vessel, and to determine the likelihood that transshipment is taking place.