News

The Sustainable Eel Group (SEG) is calling for EU action to prevent illegal fishing and trafficking of European eel before it is too late.…

Even though fishing activities have been monitored for selected fleets using electronic vessel monitoring systems, logbooks, and onboard observers, these efforts only provide very limited evidence of a region’s fishing patterns. A new study published by Science Magazine has made use of global satellite-based observations along with artificial intelligence to train and analyse the 22 billion messages publicly broadcast from marine vessels’ automatic identification system (AIS) from 2012 to 2016. The particularity of movements relating to fishing have led to the identification of more than 70,000 fishing vessels ranging from 6 to 146 m in length, with a 95% accuracy. The movements of these commercial fishing vessels have been tracked hourly and reveal a global ‘heat map’ that covers more than 55% of the ocean’s surface or over four times the area covered by agriculture. Although the data set includes only a limited proportion of the world’s estimated 2.9 million motorized fishing vessels, it encompasses most of the larger vessels exceeding 24m in length and is estimated to account for between 50 to 70% of the total high seas fishing. Over the course of 2016, the data set captured 40 million hours of fishing activity by these vessels covering a combined distance of more than 460 million km, the equivalent of traveling to the moon and back 600 times, and consuming 19 billion kWh of energy.

Italy is the world’s fourth largest producer of anchovy with 37,511 tonnes caught in 2015 according to the latest EUMOFA Case Study: Processed Anchovy in Italy.…

In October 2017, the European Commission and the Estonian Presidency of the EU Council jointly organised the conference “Beyond 2020: Supporting Europe’s Coastal Communities” in Tallinn,…

At the end of 2017, the Russian Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance (Rosselkhoznadzor) lifted a two-year ban on the import of canned fish from Latvia and Estonia.…

According to a new report, Brexit can cost Danish jobs and have large consequences for a number of Danish fishing ports.…

Irina Makarenko, Pollution Monitoring and Assessment Officer and Prof. Halil Ibrahim Sur, Executive Director of the Commission on the Protection of the Black Sea Against Pollution met with Aina Afanasjeva,…

Satellite imagery and big data infrastructure offer a more cost-effective way to tighten enforcement against IUU fishing,…

Japanese seriola (Seriola lalandi) farms run by Kurose Suisan and Global Ocean Works are the first in the world to be certified to the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) standard.…