Global Fishing Watch rolls out global vessel tracking blueprint for governments

Global Fishing Watch on Sept. 10 launched a new best-practices guide at a U.N. fisheries meeting in Rome to help governments modernize vessel tracking, close enforcement gaps and fight illegal fishing. The framework offers more than 70 recommendations and pushes for stronger use of AIS and VMS across jurisdictions.

Why it matters: - Global Fishing Watch says the guide is the first comprehensive framework for governments seeking to strengthen vessel tracking systems and improve ocean governance. - Better tracking can help authorities detect illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, strengthen fisheries management and improve enforcement. - More consistent standards could also make it harder for vessels to move between jurisdictions and exploit gaps in oversight.

What happened: - Global Fishing Watch launched the Vessel Tracking Best Practices Guide on Sept. 10 in Rome during the 37th Session of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s Committee on Fisheries. - María Soledad Tapia, national director of Chile’s National Fisheries and Aquaculture Service, unveiled the guide. - The guide is aimed at governments and the fisheries sector. - The release says the framework includes more than 70 practical recommendations for designing, operating and modernizing vessel tracking systems.

The details: - Global Fishing Watch research says roughly 75% of the world’s industrial fishing vessels are not publicly tracked through AIS. - VMS has existed for decades, but no internationally recognized standard tells governments how to use it. - National approaches vary widely, which creates gaps in monitoring, interoperability and enforcement. - The guide was developed from years of global operations, expert input and experience monitoring more than 120,000 vessels worldwide. - The guide recommends treating AIS and VMS as complementary systems rather than competing technologies. - AIS broadcasts a vessel’s identity, position, speed and course. - VMS was designed for fisheries management and regulatory oversight and has historically transmitted data through restricted channels. - Using both systems together lets authorities cross-check identities and positions, identify inconsistencies and build a fuller picture of activity at sea. - For governments already running VMS programs, adding AIS can expand tracking coverage and improve data quality without duplicating infrastructure. - The guide says vessel tracking data can also support maritime security, search and rescue, marine protected areas, seafood traceability, labor work, climate work and biodiversity work. - The recommendations cover modern vessel tracking architecture, sustainable financing models, transparency and interoperability, legal frameworks that support prosecution, AIS and VMS integration, artificial intelligence and automated analytics, and regional and international cooperation. - The guide calls for VMS position updates every one to 15 minutes, instead of traditional intervals of one to two hours or longer. - Higher-frequency data can help detect short-lived events such as fishing activity, transshipments and incursions into closed areas. - The guide recommends separating how often positions are recorded onboard from how often the data is sent ashore to help manage satellite communication costs. - The guide lays out a phased path: start with vessel identification, secure data collection and basic mapping; move to integrated AIS and VMS analysis and automated event detection; then use machine learning and artificial intelligence to spot complex behavior and anomalies. - The guide urges governments to make vessel identities, ownership, tracking data and compliance records accessible to relevant stakeholders.

Between the lines: - The guide frames vessel tracking as an infrastructure problem as much as an enforcement problem. - The emphasis on interoperability suggests the current challenge is not only collecting data, but making that data usable across agencies and borders. - Global Fishing Watch is also pushing a broader policy goal: a more harmonized international standard that would reduce fragmentation in how countries monitor fishing fleets.

What's next: - Governments can use the guide as a roadmap to upgrade existing systems without rebuilding them from scratch. - The next step for many countries will be aligning national rules, data sharing practices and enforcement tools with the guide’s recommendations. - The push for common standards could accelerate regional coordination and make cross-border enforcement more effective.

The bottom line: - Global Fishing Watch is betting that vessel tracking works best when AIS, VMS, data sharing and enforcement all operate as one system, not a patchwork.