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New approaches are required to undertake the substantial task of monitoring ongoing fishing activity in marine conservation areas to ensure conservation goals are achieved. To address this need, we applied previously developed, yet currently underused, vessel tracking methods based on Automatic Identification System (AIS) and aerial surveillance (“flyovers”) to Canada's Pacific marine conservation areas from 2012 to 2019. We used satellite and terrestrial‐based AIS receivers and flyover‐based visual observations to estimate illegal and legal fishing activity after 185 conservation area (CA) enactments (i.e., static, geographically defined areas with fishing regulations). We compared the effectiveness in detecting fishing activity between the AIS‐ and flyover‐based methods, and used the latter to determine that 93% of vessels were actively fishing in CAs without AIS. The AIS‐based method still detected 3303 h …