[14][16] To identify transshipment at sea encounters, a team from Global Fishing Watch synchronized AIS broadcasts with fishery registry entries collected over a period of five years from 2012 to 2017.
[18] In 2018, Global Fishing Watch has released an interactive map on its website, showing likely transshipment at sea encounters in near-real time.
Skylight, a company founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, has developed a maritime information system for governments and other organizations combining AIS, satellite imagery (SAR and EO), machine learning algorithms, and network analysis to detect transshipments and illegal fishing in real time.
[21] Over half of the events occurred on the high seas beyond national jurisdiction (51,8%), frequently in international waters off the coast of Russia, Japan, Argentina, and Peru in the vicinity of large squid fleets and near the Exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of East-African countries.
[22] Using a subset of the dataset put together by Global Fishing Fishing Watch, researchers found that regional patterns of likely transshipment behavior can be further discerned by the type of ships used in the encounters: Trawlers were most common within national waters particularly in the northern hemisphere, purse-seiners were predominant in the Western-Pacific Ocean, longliners mainly amassed in the equatorial regions in tropical and subtropical waters, and squid jiggers clustered along the edges of South-American EEZs as well as off the coast of Eastern Russia and Japan.
Among them, there are countries like Panama (20,2% of the total of likely transshipment encounters), Liberia (5,4%) and Vanuatu (13,3%), listed by the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) as particularly lax on restrictions and oversight.
[41] The Environmental Justice Foundation also documented forced labor onboard of Thai fishing vessels[42] as well as the use of mother ships for human trafficking off the West-African coast.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) fishing- and transshipment vessels play a role in the smuggling of cocaine, and amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS)[46] The office reported several instances of cocaine seizures on fishing vessels used by South-American, European, and African drug syndicates to transship their illicit goods to smaller speedboats or larger mother ships.