Over the last decade, marine ecologists have grown increasingly worried about the impact of trawling fishing gear on seafloor ecosystems. But evidence of this activity remained largely invisible from the surface until two years ago. That's when trawling expert Elliot Norse of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute in Bellevue, Washington learned of a way to detect shallow-water trawling as it happens, and possibly quantify it worldwide.
The breakthrough came thanks to Google Earth, the popular application that lets the public explore maps with satellite photos. A California fishing consultant had discovered that digital images of the ocean include high-resolution pictures of fishing boats and the plumes of seafloor mud that they kick up. (The plumes persist in the water for roughly eight hours after they're formed. If a satellite happens to pass over during that period, it can record the trawling for posterity). "Call it Google serendipity," says John Amos, who runs the nonprofit remote sensing group SkyTruth. He's collected some of the photos and will present them tomorrow at a session on the oceans.
The next step is to gather enough photos to quantify trawling worldwide. Over beers today at California Pizza Kitchen with Norse and Les Watling, a marine biologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Amos came up with one way to amass the Google data. "We just need a lot of graduate students who can be paid in pizza or occasionally beer," he said. Watling suggested enlisting ecologically-minded volunteers from the internet—people who wouldn't mind trawling, if you will, Google Earth for the plumes and reporting them to scientists, who could quantify them and measure them over time. "If you have enough sets of eyeballs on a data set they're going to find something interesting," says Amos.
Though the Google approach only detects trawling in shallow waters, Watling thinks it's a great start. "I just think this is the coolest damn thing," he says. "It's a really creative way of getting data," adds Stanford University marine ecologist Fiorenza Micheli.
--Eli Kintisch
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