John Amos, President, SkyTruth:

You know for years we've been puzzling over the problem of showing people what's happening in the environment out in the ocean because so much of the important things that are happening to the ocean are happening--you know, way offshore out of sight from land, or underneath the surface of the water.

Paul Woods, Chief Technology Officer, SkyTruth:

You can’t see what's below the waves, and you can see what's more than 10 miles offshore. Nobody ever see’s that.

John Amos:


I think it's really important for people to realize that yeah the ocean is huge, but it's not infinite.

Paul Woods:


The Oceans are running out of fish. It’s all the nations of the world. Commercial fishing vessels are taking too many fish, they're competing with each other to catch declining fish stocks, so they’re working harder and harder and harder to catch fewer and fewer fish. So in the end there wont be any fish.

John Amos:


Global fishing watch is a partnership between SkyTruth, Oceana and Google, to take all of the track-able commercial fishing activity in the ocean, around the world, and put it on a map, on the Web for everybody to see. So part of what we do at SkyTruth is just try to make the invisible visible. and we stumbled across this technology called automatic identification system.

And it's a ship to ship system of radio frequency broadcasts where vessels can tell each other where they are, who they are, how big they are, and where they're moving and how fast.

And it turns out that these ship to ship broadcast can be intercepted by satellites flying overhead a couple hundred miles up. Based on the way the fishing vessel is moving, out in the ocean, we can tell when it's actually engaged in fishing activity.

So as long as you’re actually broadcasting- we can construct a path that your vessel has followed and put that on a map for everybody. 

Paul Woods:


And and so now you can tell based on when and where the fishing happened overlaid with the map of what the rules are, you can see whether it was in a place that was legal or not. So you know it starts from from a red it goes up to yellow and orange and white. So, the intensity of it shows you how much fishing is happening there and then it’s just like you're in Google Earth or Google Maps. Just like you'd expect, just zoom in, you move around and you see where the fishing is and then you have a little time slider that will let you move through the years and look at how the fishing changed over time.

John Amos:


So with global fishing watch right now, even though the amount of fishing activities that were able to see and show people is kind of jaw-dropping … it’s really only the tip of the iceberg at this point and just a glimpse at what the total commercial fishing picture is.

Paul Woods:


We enable thousands of watchdogs who are currently not--don’t have the tools to speak up. And that's exactly what motivates me with SkyTruth. It’s taking the unseen world and making it more visible to more people which inspires better management.