overview
There has been significant interest in the last few years on gathering and using public data to better understand the scope and impact of commercial activity on the health of our ocean ecosystems. We are interested in how that information about legal and illegal fishing activity along with other commercial activity at ports, around oil platforms, etc., might intersect with data on water quality, fish populations, and other ocean health indicators. Skylight, launched out of Paul Allen’s philanthropy arm Vulcan, is focused on providing transparency to maritime activity, helping governments hold bad actors accountable. Global Fishing Watch, a non-profit set up as a collaboration between Oceana, SkyTruth, and Google, works to provide transparency in global fishing to ensure ocean sustainability. On the research front, Dr. Reggie Watson brought together several open source datasets to compare global fishing activity over the last 60 years (article in Nature journal Scientific Data).
Narrowing our scope to the South China Sea and the West Coast of the US, allows us to explore complex questions at the intersection of sustainability, commerce, and geopolitics.
How you can get involved
We’re interested in what questions you would ask, what data sets do you want to see included.
Get in touch and share your ideas.
