A Small Global Footprint: Recent paper using higher resolution data concludes that only 4% of the global ocean is fished.

The global footprint of fishing is an ongoing topic of discussion and discrepancies in the scale of data are producing wildly different answers.

Global Fishing Watch, a new partnership between Oceana, SkyAtlas  and Google, tracked fishing boats around the world between 2012 and 2016 to determine how much of the world’s ocean is fished.

One of their first major publications attempting to map the ‘global footprint’ of fishing concluded that 55% of the global ocean was fished. However a recent paper, using the exact same data, concluded that only 4% of the global ocean is fished.

This post on SustainableFisheries-UW.org  explains how using higher resolution data concludes that only 4% of the global ocean is fished.

Read the full post here.