This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. The published version of this Preprint is available: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-23688-7. This is version 1 of this Preprint.
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Abstract
Because many vessels use the Automatic Identification System (AIS) to broadcast GPS positions, recent advances in satellite technology have enabled us to map global fishing activity. Understanding of human activity at sea, however, is limited because an unknown number of vessels do not broadcast AIS. Those vessels can be detected by satellite-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery, but this technology has not yet been deployed at scale to estimate the size of fleets in the open ocean. Here we combine SAR and AIS for large-scale open ocean monitoring, revealing that, between September 2019 and January 2020, non-broadcasting vessels accounted for about 35% of the longline activity north of Madagascar and 10% of activity near French Polynesia and Kiribati’s Line Islands. We further demonstrate that this method could monitor half of the global longline activity with about 70 SAR images per week, allowing us to track human activity across the oceans.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.31223/X5M34J
Subjects
Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Remote Sensing
Keywords
SAR, Longlines, synthetic aperture radar, Fishing, AIS, remote sensing, Fisheries
Dates
Published: 2022-04-06 00:56
Last Updated: 2022-04-06 07:56
License
CC BY Attribution 4.0 International
Additional Metadata
Conflict of interest statement:
None
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