Fight to Slow Plummeting Fish Populations Has a Big Data Problem

Biendi Maganga-Moussavou had a problem.

As Gabon’s minister of fisheries, agriculture and food security, he helps oversee the African country’s marine protected areas, some of the most extensive in Africa. Covering 27% of Gabon’s Exclusive Economic Zone, these waters are supervised using monitoring technology that tracks larger vessels, which are required to report their catch. But many of Gabon’s fishers run smaller operations that don’t have such systems, or even automated identification.

“Thousands of boats were going out and we didn’t know where they were going or for how long,” Magana-Moussavou said in an interview. And since whatever they caught and where they ...