AI as a Weapon to Defend the Seas from Illegal Fishing

Almost 70 percent of the Earth is covered by clouds at any given moment, according to NASA. On top of that, a slew of other factors can obscure a typical camera, including tree canopies and night-time darkness.

“How do you solve that? By being the light,” Gupta says.

SAR uses polarized microwaves to image the Earth. Radar waves in specific orientations are sent out, and when they hit objects, they bounce around and return to the satellite. The waves are small enough that they can pass through clouds.

It’s similar to the technology used in distance sensors on cars, according to Gupta. But the SAR on satellites is much more precise than what is in the latest Honda.

After the images are collected, machine learning algorithms paint a detailed picture: where vessels are, how large they are, what they are doing and, based on that information, what are the odds that they are engaging in illegal activity, Gupta says.

Dark Vessels

Fishing isn’t the only concern. IUU is associated with drug smuggling, human trafficking, and modern-day slavery, according to the DIU. IUU also accelerates the impact of climate change, the DIU reports.

“Traditionally, sailors manually review all obtained intelligence, such as satellite or aerial imagery for a vessel of interest,” Sugimoto says. “With the accurate automation provided by xView3, analysts can now simply filter detected vessels to find the ones of interest.”

One of the outcomes of the challenge is an interactive map showing vessels at sea across the world. This map is on the US Department of Transportation’s SeaVision website.

“The xView3 Challenge was a great opportunity for us to advance state-of-the-art technology for detecting dark vessels,” says Paul Woods, chief innovation officer for Global Fishing Watch, a nonprofit that integrates data analytics to support ocean conservation. “We are leveraging the learnings from the competition to advance our efforts in creating a free and open map that reveals all industrial human activity at sea.”

Global Fishing Watch partnered with DIU to run the xView Challenge program. The Coast Guard, NOAA, and the National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office also supported the challenge.

A DIU press release stated that xView3 “[motivated] several concrete actions that have improved maritime security,” but did not specify what those actions were.

Gupta did not share how many vessels were apprehended specifically because of this technology. That information is considered sensitive, he says, and furthermore, “Our detections that we provide are one piece of knowledge that’s part of a larger arsenal of information that our partners use to make decisions.”

Guarding the Pacific

DIU’s xView Challenge is not the only maritime enforcement initiative targeted at IUU.

An international mission happens close to home each year: Operation North Pacific Guard (NPG). The operation is run by the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission (NPAFC), a multilateral conservation group that seeks to preserve Pacific salmon and steelhead trout stocks.

The Coast Guard and NOAA are two of the agencies involved in running NPG. In 2021 and 2022, NOAA and its partners patrolled almost 30,000 miles and boarded dozens of boats.

In addition to illegally caught salmon on the high seas, NPG patrols were looking for driftnets, which are large, unanchored nets that float in the water. Driftnets are notorious for high rates of bycatch, and the United Nations established a global moratorium on them.

Although there were around forty violations found in 2021, in 2022 there were no signs of people intentionally fishing salmon illegally, and NPG had not encountered driftnets since 2019, according to Julie Fair, public affairs officer for the Alaska Region of NOAA.

“It is likely that, at least in the near term, NPG has significantly curtailed this highly destructive practice in the North Pacific,” she says.

All Hands on Deck

Other actions are taken on land to preserve the oceans and protect fishermen. Senators Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski, along with three of their colleagues, introduced the Fighting Foreign Illegal Seafood Harvest Act of 2022.

The FISH Act would, among other things, instruct the Coast Guard to increase at-sea inspections of foreign vessels suspected of IUU, have NOAA create a blacklist of parties that have engaged in IUU and other maritime crime, and have the executive branch inform Congress on technology that can be used to combat IUU.

“This is an all-hands-on-deck effort to crack down on foreign fishing, to keep our fisheries sustainable, and to focus on actors who are engaged in this kind of illegal fishing,” Sullivan says.

A lot of those actors are international rivals.

The IUU Fishing Index, a website developed by fisheries consulting firm Poseidon Aquatic Resource Management Ltd. and the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, analyzes various factors, including coastal sizes and port management, to determine how well a country monitors and addresses IUU fishing. China and Russia were ranked as the worst countries in the world in the most recent assessment, based on information from 2021.

China especially is notorious for its “dark fleets,” or unreported fishing vessels. A 2020 study from the global affairs think tank ODI (formerly the Overseas Development Institute) found China had almost 17,000 vessels in its distant-water fishing fleets, including 1,000 vessels registered in different countries.

More than one-third of vessels that were caught engaging in IUU between 2010 and 2022 were Chinese, according to a 2022 study from the Financial Transparency Coalition.

The Problem Is Global

“It’s kind of a witch’s brew of elements that not only harm the environment, harm the oceans, [and] harm the sustainability of fisheries; there’s human suffering that goes within this,” Sullivan says.

For example, West African coastal countries lose more than 37 percent of their seafood to IUU fishing, and this is driving people to flee their homes, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime reports.

“This is an issue that kind of really crosses over from different federal agencies, not just your traditional fisheries agencies like NOAA and the Coast Guard but into the Pentagon and in the Navy,” Sullivan says.

And technology will play a large role in patrolling the seas, according to Sullivan.

“The problem is huge. The problem is global,” Sullivan says. “Americans think it’s not hard to find a ship in the big Pacific Ocean, or the big Atlantic Ocean, but it is hard. And so having available technologies to track, particularly these suspected IUU fishing vessels, we think is an important component and will only increase in importance in the years coming.”

He says the FISH Act of 2022 goes hand in hand with other legislation he is proposing, including the US-Russian Federation Seafood Reciprocity Act of 2023.

Sullivan is especially concerned about sanction loopholes that allow Russian fish to be imported to the United States.

Russia blocked the import of fish from the United States in 2014, but the United States still allowed Russian seafood imports until 2022, after Russia openly invaded Ukraine. The new sanction does not affect seafood caught in Russian waters and processed elsewhere, however. According to Sullivan, “elsewhere” means China.

“Then it gets sent back into the US market, almost duty free, so it’s essentially laundering Russian seafood,” he says. “And this is hundreds of millions of dollars of seafood very negatively impacting our fishermen and seafood industry.”

The Seafood Reciprocity Act of 2023 would stop this by banning all Russian seafood from entering the United States, including fish processed in other countries.

“It literally took a war to make good progress,” Sullivan says. “Now we made good progress, we got to close that loophole.”

Defensive Technology

As long as IUU remains a global security concern, more so than a mere obstacle to fair commerce, DoD will be on the case. Military-grade technology is already yielding results and contributing to a larger movement to end illegal fishing, domestically and on the high seas.

Algorithms submitted to the xView3 Challenge, including the five winning ones, can be used by any country in implementing their own monitoring system, according to Gupta. Thus, AI will continue to monitor fisheries and enforce maritime law going forward.

“In the end, fighting the environmental and economic scourge of IUU fishing and tracking illegal shipping will require a concerted and collaborative effort amongst nations, NGOs, and the private sector,” the DIU press release stated. “xView3 is a prime example of how the US security community can lead the way in making progress on these objectives while also addressing some of its own intelligence needs for pennies on the dollar.”