To catch a fishing thief, SkyTruth uses data from the air, land and sea

The plucky nonprofit, whose founder's once dismissed warnings about offshore drilling foretold the BP oil spill, enlists help from Google and Oceana to create a website for tracking illegal fishing

No one knows how much illegal fishing goes on in the oceans. They're too vast to patrol. But a small nonprofit is helping governments track down seafood pirates by using powerful software, digital maps and publicly available data.

That nonprofit, SkyTruth, is led by a 52-year-old geologist named John Amos. It has fewer than a dozen employees and operates out of rural Shepherdstown, West Virginia - population: 2,140. Yet last spring, SkyTruth used its data to help the government of the Pacific island nation Palau track down a Taiwanese fishing ship whose holds were filled with illegally caught tuna and shark fins.