Although fishing is one of the most widespread activities by which humans harvest natural resources, its global footprint is poorly understood and has never been directly quantified. We processed 22 billion automatic identification system messages and tracked >70,000 industrial fishing vessels from 2012 to 2016, creating a global dynamic footprint of fishing effort with spatial and temporal resolution two to three orders of magnitude higher than for previous data sets. Our data show that industrial fishing occurs in >55% of ocean area and has a spatial extent more than four times that of agriculture. We find that global patterns of fishing have surprisingly low sensitivity to short-term economic and environmental variation and a strong response to cultural and political events such as holidays and closures.

Much of the economic profitability of fishing the high seas is dependent on government subsidies.

Large marine protected areas (MPAs) have recently been established throughout the world at an unprecedented pace, yet the value of these reserves for mobile species conservation remains unclear. Reef shark populations continue to decline even within some of the largest MPAs, fueling unresolved debates over the ability of protected areas to aid mobile species that transit beyond MPA boundaries. We assessed the capacity of a large MPA to conserve grey reef sharks - a Near Threatened species with a widespread distribution and poorly understood offshore movement patterns - using a combination of conventional tags, satellite tags, and an emerging vessel tracking technology. We found that the 54,000 km2 U.S. Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the central Pacific Ocean provides substantial protection for grey reef sharks, as two-thirds of satellite-tracked sharks remained within MPA boundaries for the entire study duration. Additionally, our analysis of > 0.5 million satellite detections of commercial fishing vessels identified virtually no fishing effort within the refuge and significant effort beyond the MPA perimeter, suggesting that large MPAs can effectively benefit reef sharks and other mobile species if properly enforced. However, our results also highlight limitations of place-based conservation as some of these reef-associated sharks moved surprising distances into pelagic waters (up to 926 km from Palmyra Atoll, 810 km beyond MPA boundaries). Small-scale fishermen operating beyond MPA boundaries (up to 366 km from Palmyra) captured 2% of sharks that were initially tagged at Palmyra, indicating that large MPAs provide substantial, though incomplete, protection for reef sharks

Surface mining for coal has taken place in the Central Appalachian region of the United States for well over a century, with a notable increase since the 1970s. Researchers have quantified the ecosystem and health impacts stemming from mining, relying in part on a geospatial dataset defining surface mining’s extent at a decadal interval. This dataset, however, does not deliver the temporal resolution necessary to support research that could establish causal links between mining activity and environmental or public health and safety outcomes, nor has it been updated since 2005. Here we use Google Earth Engine and Landsat imagery to map the yearly extent of surface coal mining in Central Appalachia from 1985 through 2015, making our processing models and output data publicly available. We find that 2,900 km2 of land has been newly mined over this 31-year period. Adding this more-recent mining to surface mines constructed prior to 1985, we calculate a cumulative mining footprint of 5,900 km2. Over the study period, correlating active mine area with historical surface mine coal production shows that each metric ton of coal is associated with 12 m2 of actively mined land. Our automated, open-source model can be regularly updated as new surface mining occurs in the region and can be refined to capture mining reclamation activity into the future. We freely and openly offer the data for use in a range of environmental, health, and economic studies; moreover, we demonstrate the capability of using tools like Earth Engine to analyze years of remotely sensed imagery over spatially large areas to quantify land use change.

Illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing threatens resource sustainability and equity. A major challenge with such activity is that most fishing vessels do not broadcast their positions and are “dark” in public monitoring systems. Combining four satellite technologies, we identify widespread illegal fishing by dark fleets in the waters between the Koreas, Japan, and Russia. We find >900 vessels of Chinese origin in 2017 and >700 in 2018 fished illegally in North Korean waters, catching an estimated amount of Todarodes pacificus approximating that of Japan and South Korea combined (>164,000 metric tons worth >$440 million). We further find ~3000 small-scale North Korean vessels fished, mostly illegally, in Russian waters. These results can inform independent oversight of transboundary fisheries and foreshadow a new era in satellite monitoring of fisheries.