Case Study: Global Fishing Watch achieves global, near‑real‑time visibility of fishing activity to combat illegal fishing with Google Cloud Platform

Global Fishing Watch Protecting global fisheries

Global Fishing Watch, a collaboration of Oceana, SkyTruth, and Google, set out to tackle collapsing fish stocks and rampant illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing by creating transparency across the world’s oceans. The challenge was immense: millions of satellite AIS messages from over 200,000 vessels and limited monitoring resources meant there was no global, time‑series view of fishing activity to inform policy or enforcement.

Using Google Cloud Platform (Compute Engine, BigQuery, Cloud ML, Earth Engine, Maps, etc.), Global Fishing Watch ingests ~22 million AIS messages daily (about 10 TB and tens of billions of records), applies machine learning to classify vessel behavior, and serves results via an interactive public map and datasets. The platform delivers near‑real‑time, queryable insights (queries in ~60 seconds), helps identify likely illegal fishing (enabling enforcement such as a $2M fine in Kiribati), and provides governments, NGOs, researchers, and industry with unprecedented data to manage fisheries sustainably.

Global Fishing Watch

Paul Woods

Chief Technology Officer