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OCEAN · FISHING FLEETS

Fishing Fleets — Where the Boats Work

Almost every commercial fishing boat broadcasts its position over AIS — the same automatic signal ships use to avoid each other. Add a year of those positions together and a portrait of the fishing fleet emerges: the grounds worked hard, the lanes the boats run, the quiet water in between. This map shows that density across Europe’s seas — hours of fishing-vessel presence in every square kilometre — from December 2024.

FULL MAP →

Fishing-vessel density: EMODnet Human Activities (Cogea) · hours/km²/month · December 2024

Honest scope: this is the European picture, published monthly— EMODnet’s grid covers EU waters and neighbouring seas, not the whole planet, and shows a month of accumulated presence rather than live boat-by-boat tracks. It’s the commercial-OK, properly-licensed way to show where fleets work.

Understand the fleet

FIELD GUIDEWhat fishing-vessel density shows — and how AIS reveals where boats work

How the picture is built

1 · EVERY BOAT PINGSCommercial vessels broadcast their position over AIS, picked up by coastal receivers and satellites.
2 · ADD UP THE HOURSFishing-type vessels’ positions are summed into a 1 km grid as hours of presence per cell, each month.
3 · THE GROUNDS APPEARWorked grounds glow bright; transit lanes thread between them; little-fished water stays dark.

The map you see is the Fishingship-type from EMODnet’s vessel-density product — one of thirteen vessel categories they publish. Because it’s built from AIS, it captures vessels that carry and transmit AIS (most commercial boats), and density is a proxy for effort, not a direct catch figure. EMODnet updates the dataset each year; this layer pins the most recent published month.

Related layers

OCEANMarine Life — the animals the fleets share the sea with (incl. sharks)OCEANOceans & Seas — which sea each ground sits inOCEANPhytoplankton — the blooms that feed the fishEARTHLive Ships — all marine traffic on the Earth map

SEE IT ON THE MAP

Find the worked grounds off your own coast.

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