How AI Can Help Keep Ocean Fisheries Sustainable

But by effectively automating part of the job of the observer by using cameras to record what creatures are caught and sophisticated software to classify them by species, regulators would be able to get a fuller picture of legal harvests and detect unlawful operations. Just as automation and machine learning have given internet companies detailed records and predictions of how users behave online, they can potentially enable scientists and government agencies to build similarly detailed models of the world's fisheries. "Today it's estimated that what's called illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing costs the region between a half billion dollars and $1.5 billion a year," Zimring says. And even low rates of accidental capture and killing of important predators such as sharks can have significant impacts on aquatic ecosystems, he says. "We really need to understand, from a kind of science perspective, when at-risk species like sharks and turtles are being caught, and what really happens to them," he says.