Feedback:

• Fishing Effort Data Access and Analysis: I was able to use the API again to look at encounters of boats and see if our birds were associated with boats that have fishing effort data. It’s been eye-opening. The ability to see a vessel track in tandem with an albatross track allows for so many questions to be answered from a perspective that wasn’t available before.

• Real-Time Data Visualization: I think it’s worth mentioning that while the portal has a delay in real-time data (around five days), it’s still incredibly useful for rolling through time series and visualizing interactions. The improvements to the map, along with the API, have been really helpful.

• GFW Map and API Improvements: I really like the brighter colors, as the previous lighter colors were a bit of a strain on the eyes. I was happy to see I could upload bird tracks as points rather than tracks, which was especially useful for visualizing radar pings. I made the radar points larger to indicate when a bird was near a boat, and that was really cool to see in real-time. Lastly, I’d say that without the API and portal, it would be impossible for us to visualize and interact with this level of vessel and bird data. Global Fishing Watch has built a tool we couldn’t replicate on our own, and it’s been invaluable for our research

• Educational Use Cases: I’ve also been using the portal to set up another professor with albatross data for a lecture and lab format at San Jose State University.

Product Requests and Other:

• Inclusion of Non-Fishing Vessel Data: One thing I’d like to see in the API is access to vessel density, not just fishing effort. I’d be interested in something similar to the density layer for container ship traffic or general vessel density, not limited to actively fishing boats. It would be helpful to have access to composite densities for all AIS data, in line with what your portal offers.

• Handling International Date Line Crossings: One thing I’ve noticed is that when birds cross the International Date Line, it causes issues if the tracks are uploaded as lines, but uploading them as points works fine. For a recent assignment, I provided my students with two example tracks with clear radar hits associated with vessels and four tracks with radar hits that didn’t have an associated vessel. Their task was to use the portal to investigate whether those hits were truly unmatched or if they could identify vessels with gaps in AIS transmissions.