Identifying Companies Fishing in High Seas.

• Position: SATELLITE DATA

Using satellite data and other analytical tools, a team of researchers has identified companies fishing in high seas--waters that lie outside of national jurisdiction where fishing has raised fears about environmental and labor violations. The study, which appears in the journal One Earth, is the first to link companies to fishing activity in these largely unregulated areas.

The findings illuminate a significant element of commercial fishing. Previously, researchers only could identify which countries reported catching fish on the high seas, which account for 60% of the world's oceans and therefore represent a substantial proportion of waters that lie beyond the reach of national jurisdiction.

"We also have a much better sense of what we don't know," adds first author Gabrielle Carmine, a doctoral candidate at Duke University's School of the Environment. "The corporate actors we know vary by fishing gear type and by location in the high seas. For example, we know far more about the trawling fleet than the longline fleet and more about the Atlantic Ocean than the Western Tropical Pacific."

Species caught on the...