Author: Carolyn Gramling / Source: Science News for Students
People’s taste for seafood affects a surprisingly large share of Earth’s oceans. That’s according to a new study that mapped where marine fish are harvested.
Oceans cover more than two-thirds of the planet’s surface. In 2016, fishing fleets used more than 55 percent of the ocean’s area, the new study shows.
In contrast, only about one-third of Earth’s land area supports agriculture or livestock grazing. That means that catching fish uses four times as much of the Earth’s surface as all the food plants and animals grown on land!Fishing vessels have plied the oceans for hundreds of years to catch fish. Data about where they fished and how much time they spent at sea have been scarce and inconsistent. Now, though, most large ships have a tracking system. It’s meant to help them avoid collisions. Called an automatic identification system, or AIS, it sends out data on where vessels are and how fast they are moving.
Fourteen researchers from universities, Google and other groups used these data to map fishing throughout the seas. For their new study, they examined 22 billion AIS data points between 2012 and 2016. The team trained computers to sort through all of those data. They turned up more than 70,000 fishing vessels. Then, the researchers tracked the…
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