Fishing activity covers at least 55 percent of the world’s oceans, four times the land area covered by agriculture, and it can now be monitored, in near real time, to the level of individual vessels. 

Using satellite tracking, machine learning and AIS data, scientists from the University of California Santa Barbara, Global Fishing Watch, National Geographic Society’s Pristine Sea project, Dalhousie University, SkyTruth, Google and Stanford University have tracked the extent of global fishing down to single vessel movements and hourly activity. 

The researchers say the global fishing fleet is so big it can be seen from space, and they mapped 70,000 vessels from the global fishing fleet – which traveled 460 million kilometers in 2016, equivalent to traveling to the moon and back 600 times.

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