Many coastal states regulate transhipment to take place within their port limits as an MCS control mechanism. This is often paired with regulations that prohibit at-sea transhipment. Currently GFW tools do not show transhipment activity within 10km of the coast because of the noisy data from many vessels transiting in coastal areas, and vessels being in proximity to many other vessels within both anchorages and ports which all lead to lots of encounters being generated (both true and false).

It is important to be able to evaluate this in-port activity as it is the primary vector of fish movement in many coastal states and the current configuration of GFW tools does not identify in port-transhipments for MCS users to investigate.