Managing fisheries from space: Google Earth improves estimates of distant fish catches

Abstract

Global fisheries are overexploited worldwide, yet crucial catch statistics reported to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) by member countries remain unreliable. Recent advances in remote-sensing technology allow us to view fishing practices from space and mitigate gaps in catch reporting. Here, we use Google Earth to count intertidal fishing weirs off the coast of six countries in the Persian Gulf, otherwise known as the Arabian Gulf. Although the name of this body of water remains contentious, we use the name used in Google Earth. Combining, in a Monte Carlo procedure, the number of weirs (after correcting for poor resolution and imagery availability) with assumptions about daily catch and fishing season lengths, we estimate that 1900 (±79) weirs contribute to a regional catch up to six times higher than the officially reported catches of 5260 t. These results, which speak to the unreliability of officially reported fisheries statistics, provide the first example of fisheries catch estimates from space, and point to the potential for remote-sensing approaches to validate catch statistics and fisheries operations in general.

Monitoring of tropical freshwater fish resources for sustainable use

“…For example, vessel monitoring systems and bioacoustics are used extensively to monitor fish and fisheries (Gerritsen & Lordan, Hogan et al , ; Lindseth & Lobel, ). Increasingly data from earth observation is finding its place in global monitoring systems and although fish are below the surface, there are surrogates of fishing activity and production that have more recently been used to estimate fishing pressure and fish abundance, such as the presence of boats and traps (Al‐Abdulrazzak & Pauly, ) and indicators of primary production (Deines et al, ), respectively.…”

A Saxon Fish Weir and Undated Fish Trap Frames Near Ashlett Creek, Hampshire, UK: Static Structures on a Dynamic Foreshore

“…The global and chronological distribution of such structures is impressive (McGrail 1983: 36, 39-46;Desse-Berset and Billard 2012: 13-17;Billard 2016a: 23-31). Outside of our area of focus, illustrative (though not exhaustive) archaeological and ethnographic examples may be cited from other parts of Europe (Jankó 1900;Sirelius 1906;Antipa 1916;Viveen et al 2014), North America (Byram 1998;Tveskov and Erlandson 2003;Connaway 2007;Caldwel 2008), Africa (White 1956;MacLaren 1958;Avery 1975; Gribble 2005), the Arabian-Persian Gulf (Sergeant 1968;Carter and Killick 2010;Al-Abdulrazzak and Pauly 2013), East Asia (Chen 1976;Jeffrery and Pitmag 2010;Zayas 2011;Jeffrey 2013), Australia (Dargin 1976;Bowen 1998;McNiven et al 2012;Kelly 2014), and the Pacific (Cobb 1901: 427-433;Alexander 1902;Legendre 1912;Nishimura 1975). In chronological terms, the use of standing fishing technologies has been identified as early as the Mesolithic, for example in Zealand, Denmark (Pederson 1995, 80-82) the Blackwater estuary in Essex (Gilman 1998;Strachan 1998;Hall andClark 2000, Ingle andSaunders 2011) and on the Thames in west London (Cohen 2003(Cohen , 2008a(Cohen , b, c, 2011…”

Validating the Remotely Sensed Geography of Crime: A Review of Emerging Issues

“…Marine researchers have also used analyses of Google Earth to evaluate the veracity of fish-catch reports made to the UN [123,124]. Spain's Green Party has reported illegal bottom trawling of beaches for fish using Google Earth images, as well [125,126].…”