Experts say that up to 26 tonnes of globally fishing is illegal, unreported, or unregulated. Sadly, this is equal to a third of all fish that are caught legally.

Illegal fishing may be conducted with prohibited gear and result in overfishing, resulting in damage to coral reefs, seamounts, and other vulnerable marine ecosystems. 55% of the world’s reefs are threatened by excessive and destructive fishing. In South Asia, nearly 95% of all reefs are affected, and it is believed that most of the remote coral reefs in the world are overfished.

Other times, illegal fishing may result in the capture of protected species like the Atlantic salmon, which is endangered, or non-target species like sharks and turtles.

Fishing is an incredibly difficult industry to monitor, but some organisations are leveraging AI to tackle this problem. Last year, The Nature Conservancy instigated a challenge on Kaggle, a data science competition platform, to source a model that could detect when protected fish were caught. The software would then flag the portions of the video suspect of illegal fishing to be reviewed by a human. It currently takes 6 hours for an officer to review 10 hours of fishing footage, so this technology would increase the scrutiny placed on fishermen.