Commercial Activity (shipping Lanes) 2013 - KNB

Vessel identity and location information was obtained using two approaches. (1) Over the past 20 years, 10-20% of the vessel fleet has voluntarily participated in collecting meteorological data for the open ocean, which includes location at the time of measurement, as part of the Volunteer Observing System (VOS). (2) In order to improve maritime safety, in 2002 the International Maritime Organization SOLAS agreement required all vessels over 300 gross tonnage (GT) and vessels carrying passengers to equip Automatic Identification System (AIS) transceivers, which use the Global Positioning System (GPS) to precisely locate vessels. Eight broad classes of vessels were taken into account separately: authority, cargo, fishing, high-speed, passenger, pleasure, support, tanker and an ‘other’ class. The vessel classes which move globally (cargo, tanker, and passenger) are required to carry AIS transceivers, and in these three classes 60-70% of the total vessel fleet was observed using AIS. The resulting data layer is primarily composed of these vessel classes in both the AIS and VOS data sources, and is almost exclusively these ship types in the open ocean. We used a simple linear average of the two data sources, producing a final model resolved for the whole ocean at a resolution of 0.1 decimal degrees (~11km). Data have limited observation frequency, leading to gaps that when directly interpolated with geodesic paths, create invalid routes which cross land masses. Routing model was used to create a visibility graph of the oceans, creating valid potential movement paths. These movement paths are based on the assumption that mariners will prefer great circle distances when possible. Raw stressor data from "Benjamin Halpern, Melanie Frazier, John Potapenko, Kenneth Casey, Kellee Koenig, et al. 2015. Cumulative human impacts: raw stressor data (2008 and 2013). Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity. doi:10.5063/F1S180FS."