The plucky nonprofit, whose founder’s once dismissed warnings about offshore drilling foretold the BP oil spill, enlists help from Google and Oceana to create a website for tracking illegal fishing
No one knows how much illegal fishing goes on in the oceans. They’re too vast to patrol. But a small nonprofit is helping governments track down seafood pirates by using powerful software, digital maps and publicly available data.
That nonprofit, SkyTruth, is led by a 52-year-old geologist named John Amos. It has fewer than a dozen employees and operates out of rural Shepherdstown, West Virginia – population: 2,140. Yet last spring, SkyTruth used its data to help the government of the Pacific island nation Palau track down a Taiwanese fishing ship whose holds were filled with illegally caught tuna and shark fins.
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