Milestone 12: Vessel Monitoring Data data-sets acquired and processing.

Until recently (early 2018), there was no single coherent dataset that provided information on the spatial and temporal distribution of fishing effort at the scale of north Atlantic basin. Whilst data on fishing effort did exist for parts, e.g. the OSPAR / ICES vessel monitoring by satellite data that covers the OSPAR sea area, none extended to both the eastern and western areas simultaneously. However, in early 2018, Global Fishing Watch (GFW) released data describing fishing effort at a global scale (Kroodsma et al., 2018).