Project 2 Science · Example results

Fishing methods, seasons,
and ocean geography

Global Fishing Watch records where and when vessels fish. Wikipedia describes their fishing methods. We connect the two to compare activity, seasons, and missing vessel information.

Read the report by notebook section · See the SQL library

2023 monthly activity19.75 million daily records, Jan–Mar141 selected articles · 228 passages

Where does net-fishing activity concentrate?

The busiest selected one-degree bin begins at 30°N, 123°E, with 1.30 million apparent fishing hours across vessels during 2023.

Article descriptions identify net-fishing methods; checked mappings connect them to gear labels in the tables.

Top 300 one-degree bins for verified net-fishing categories; activity is concentrated in several coastal regions, with the largest bins near 30 degrees north and 123 degrees east. — Top 300 selected bins only. Each dot marks the center of a one-degree bin; color shows summed hours on a logarithmic scale.

Do hooks and nets follow the same seasonal pattern?

Hooks peak in October (9.6% of their annual hours). Nets peak in October (12.6% of their annual hours).

Monthly share of annual apparent fishing hours, shown separately for hooks and nets. — Each row sums to 100%. This compares timing within each family, rather than their total size.

Whose fishing activity lacks registry gear information?

72.1% of observed hours are attached to vessel records without registry gear information. These records can still have a GFW gear classification.

Registry gear is missing for 75.0% of observed vessel IDs and 72.1% of fishing hours. One vessel ID has no matching metadata record. — Jan–Mar 2023. Each bar sums to 100%. IDs are MMSI identifiers, not guaranteed physical-vessel identities.

Which Wikipedia articles did we use?

We downloaded 142 introductions. Spark retained 141 articles and split them into 228 passages for MiniLM embeddings.

Article	What it explains	Use in the project
Longline fishing	A main line carries many baited hooks.	Maps drifting and set longlines to hooks.
Gillnetting	Fish become caught in a wall of netting.	Maps set gillnets to nets.
Seine fishing	A surrounding net encloses fish.	Maps seine and purse-seine categories to nets.
Trawling	Boats tow a fishing net through the water.	Maps trawlers to nets. The table cannot separate bottom from midwater trawling.
North Sea	Describes the sea’s location and geography.	Background only; it does not assign records to a region.

Only checked method-to-gear mappings affect the SQL. Background articles are retained for context.

Does a definition library help generated SQL?

Schema-only SQL answered 3/5 correctly; adding the definition library answered 5/5.

Question	Schema only	With definitions
Northern hook/net activity	Match	Match
Southern net-fishing hotspots	Mismatch	Match
Vessel activity by gear	Match	Match
Missing registry information	Match	Match
Monthly changes by fishing method	Mismatch	Match

GPT-5.2; same questions and schemas, only the definition library changes. First responses, no repairs. Scores describe these five questions.

See the questions, schema, reference answers, and both GPT queries →

Question 5 accepts month-start dates and month numbers as equivalent representations. Strict formatting scored B 4/5; answer correctness scored B 5/5.