Illegal and unregulated fishing monitoring tracks vessel presence, apparent fishing effort, dark-vessel detection, and compliance alerts across protected areas, exclusive economic zones, regional seas, and global fishing grounds.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]

AIS-based global fishing effort mapping processed tens of billions of messages and tracked more than 70,000 industrial fishing vessels from 2012 to 2016.^[1]

AIS-derived fishing effort is incomplete for dark-vessel detection because vessels may not broadcast, may disable AIS, or may be outside reception coverage.^[2]^[4]

SAR ship detection identifies non-cooperative vessels without AIS and works day or night under cloud, making it central to IUU monitoring.^[3]^[4]

What's available today

1 data product and 39 sensors. Start with the most-used; switch to Filter for the full catalogue.

1 Data products

0 Services

39 Sensors

1 commercial

Data products

Comm. ICEYE Maritime Monitoring

Advanced Baseline Imager GOES-16

Advanced Himawari Imager Himawari-9

China Ocean Colour and Temperature Scanner HY-1D

Copernicus EMS On Demand Mapping —

COSI (Corea SAR Instrument) KOMPSAT-5

COSMIC-EYE Area Monitoring —

COSMIC-EYE Infrastructure Monitoring —

CSG-SAR COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation

ECOSTRESS (ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station) ECOSTRESS ISS deployment

Flexible Combined Imager (FCI) Meteosat-12

FY-4A Advanced Geostationary Radiation Imager FY-4A

FY-4B Advanced Geostationary Radiation Imager FY-4B

Geostationary Ocean Color Imager II (GOCI-II) GEO-KOMPSAT-2B

HY Ultraviolet Imaging and Calibration Sensor HY-1D

Infrared Multispectral Scanner - 2 Huan Jing-2A

Marmoris Coastal Ecosystem Insights —

MetaSAR-L —

MetaSAR-X —

MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) —

MONITORED AI —

MSU-GS Electro-L Imager Electro-L N4

MSU-IK-SR Kanopus-V

MSU-MR VIS/IR Imaging Radiometer Meteor-M N2-4

NISAR L-band SAR NISAR

NISAR S-band SAR NISAR

Ocean and Land Colour Instrument (OLCI) Sentinel-3B

Ocean Color Instrument PACE

Ocean Color Monitor 3 Oceansat-3

PALSAR-2 —

SAR-C (EOS-04) EOS-04

SAR-C (Gaofen-3) Gaofen-3 (GF-3)

SAR-L (SAOCOM L-band SAR) SAOCOM-1A

SAR-X (RISAT-2 series) RISAT-2BR1

SARah active phased-array SAR SARah

Second Generation Global Imager (SGLI) GCOM-C (Shikisai)

SLSTR (Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer) Sentinel-3A

Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager Meteosat-10

StriX SAR Synspective StriX

TerraSAR-X SAR TerraSAR-X

Sources

[1]Tracking the global footprint of fisheriespeer reviewed2018-02-232026-05-27
[2]Global Fishing Watch downloadable fishing effort datacommunity-2026-05-27
[3]ESA Knowledge Hub: Ship Detectionagency doc-2026-05-27
[4]Revealing the global longline fleet with satellite radarpeer reviewed2022-11-172026-05-27

How to cite this page

Plain text

Illegal and unregulated fishing. EO-Atlas, SpectraWorks B.V., last reviewed 2026-05-27. https://eo-atlas.org/topics/fishing (CC BY 4.0)

BibTeX

@misc{eoatlas:topics:fishing,
  title = {Illegal and unregulated fishing},
  author = {{EO-Atlas}},
  publisher = {SpectraWorks B.V.},
  year = {2026},
  note = {Last reviewed 2026-05-27. CC BY 4.0},
  url = {https://eo-atlas.org/topics/fishing}
}