big data

The use of slave labor to catch fish is an epidemic whose severity needs no elucidation. New technology, however, may hold the key to fighting forced labour in the fishing industry. An estimated 21 million people are trapped in enslaved labor around the world. Many of these slaves are forced to work on fishing vessels, with illegal fishing practices generating over $23 billion each year. The tendency is for men who are seeking work to board ships willingly, but then once they are isolated at sea, their wages are withheld, and they are subjected to violent, bleak working conditions for years.

The use of big data is becoming increasing accessible in aquaculture with systems like Manolin, XpertSea and Jala offering services that could revolutionize practices within the industry. These platforms aim to offer services that improve the management of farming activities. Within the production process for aquaculture, huge amounts of site and operation specific data is generated, and platforms like XpertSea offer services that streamline this data. Using Big data farmers can obtain health information on the animals they raise, monitor disease outbreaks and water quality and several other pertinent sources of information. Additionally, the use of artificial intelligence may also result in increased productivity with algorithms boosting feed conversion rates and methodologies that can detect when fish are experiencing increased biological stress.

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.

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