Editor’s Choice Managing fisheries from space: Google Earth improves estimates of distant fish catches

Global fisheries are overexploited worldwide, yet crucial catch statistics reported to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) by member countries remain unreliable. Recent advances in remote-sensing technology allowus to viewfishing practices from space andmiti-gate gaps in catch reporting. Here, we use Google Earth to count intertidal fishing weirs off the coast of six countries in the Persian Gulf, otherwise knownas theArabianGulf. Although the nameof this bodyofwater remains contentious, weuse the nameused inGoogle Earth. Combining, in a Monte Carlo procedure, the number of weirs (after correcting for poor resolution and imagery availability) with assump-tions about daily catch and fishing season lengths, we estimate that 1900 (+79) weirs contribute to a regional catch up to six times higher than the officially reported catches of 5260 t. These results, which speak to the unreliability of officially reported fisheries statistics, provide the first example of fisheries catch estimates from space, and point to the potential for remote-sensing approaches to validate catch statistics and fisheries operations in general