Global fishing in IMMAs Feb-May 2024 snapshot
18th September 2024.
Global Fishing Watch monitors global fishing activity with a real-time ever changing map showing the location and types of fishing boats with important insights into fishing activity.
In addition, it is possible to determine whether the fishing activity is in national waters or on the high seas, or whether it takes place in a marine protected area and there a number of other layers that can be switched on and off, showing ocean productivity.
Now, in a cooperative arrangement with the IUCN SSC-WCPA Marine Mammal Protected Areas Task Force, the Important Marine Mammal Area (IMMA) layer has been added in order to monitor the fishing activity occurring within individual IMMAs. This monitoring can be selected on an hourly, daily, seasonal, or yearly cumulative basis, along with other layers. Considering the impact of fisheries on marine mammals worldwide, this development has the potential to have significant consequences on the conservation of marine mammals.
For example, by looking at the map, it is possible to discover that during a three month period ending in June, 17 fishing vessels transmitting signals with AIS had 1,583 hours of apparent fishing effort in the Satun-Langkawi Archipelago IMMA in Malaysian peninsular and adjacent Thailand waters. Twelve of the 17 vessels were Malaysian, and there was also a German and a Belizean vessel fishing in this IMMA within Malaysian national waters. The shallow tropical waters of this area are considered important for aggregations of Indo-Pacific finless porpoises, Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins and Irrawaddy dolphins. There is considerably more data on the portal and you might then cross-reference by searching the Marine Traffic website.
Fishing in IMMAs in June 2024 around the British Isles-France-Denmark
The IMMA workspace on the Global Fish Watch portal promises to be a valuable addition to the Task Force – Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) joint current project to monitor and implement IMMAs. Besides the Satun-Langkawi Archipelago IMMA, researchers are currently conducting projects in the Humboldt Archipelago IMMA off Peru, in the Abrolhos IMMA off Brazil, and in several IMMAs off Kenya and Oman in the Indian Ocean. Since 2016, more than 350 scientists from 72 countries have attended workshops to nominate and champion one or more IMMAs. This tool will enable them to monitor fishing activity and potential threats from overfishing and gear entanglements in the waters where they work.
Using the GFW portal is free and open to the public. Users need to register for the site to have access to the special datasets including IMMAs: https://globalfishingwatch.org
To view the IMMA workspace, go here: https://bit.ly/GFWandIMMAs
To learn more about Global Fishing Watching products, there is an informative video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeNd7PplPk4
