Plenty of Fish in the Sea for Big Data, AI to Tackle

British fisheries scientist John Shepherd was famously quoted as saying that managing fisheries is “like managing a forest, in which the trees are invisible and keep moving around.”

This fundamental problem has bedeviled fisheries managers for decades—how to prevent overfishing, without knowing exactly how many fish are in the sea.

That task could soon become much easier: The same image-recognition technology used by police and the military may soon be able tell the difference between a flounder and a red snapper as they swim by.

As companies rush to develop increasingly high-resolution image applications, scientists and ...