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GIS Portal Streamlines Aquaculture and Fisheries in Africa
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| 10 June 2008 | Jessica Wyland, ESRI Writer
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Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him to use GIS and he will develop informed, sustainable practices in aquaculture and inland fisheries management.
Aquaculture plays an increasingly important role in the global economy, and fisheries contribute significantly to poverty alleviation and food security. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has worked for decades to promote sustainable aquaculture and fisheries in developing countries.
Since aquaculture and fisheries are fundamentally spatially distributed, and because many of the issues that relate to them are spatial in nature, responsible management requires a solid understanding of the underlying spatial dimension. GIS, remote sensing, and mapping provide the technology to assess suitability of site and zoning, migration of resources, transportation networks, markets, and habitat quality and quantity linked to plant and animal abundance and distribution. For example, researchers want to be able to study fish stocks together with fishing levels, pollution, water temperature, or other factors to see quickly how they might be interrelated.
"There are many opportunities to use GIS to improve the sustainability of aquaculture and inland fisheries," says James McDaid Kapetsky, an aquatic expert currently consulting at FAO. "Unfortunately, the widespread use of these tools is impeded by limited awareness of their benefits and unfamiliarity with how they can be deployed. GISFish was created to help overcome these impediments."
 | | Figure: Small scale fish farming in Africa |
To meet the new set of challenges, FAO used ESRI's GIS technology to create GISFish, a one-stop Internet site for GIS-based resources for aquaculture and inland fisheries in developing countries. The mission of GISFish is "solving problems in inland fisheries and aquaculture using GIS, remote sensing, and mapping." The site sets out the spatial issues addressed most frequently in aquaculture and inland fisheries and uses GIS to resolve them. GISFish integrates hardware, software, data, and personnel to analyze, display, and report information.
"It isn't always understood just how many people in Africa and the rest of the developing world depend on inland fisheries," says Jose Aguilar-Manjarrez, fishery resource officer with FAO. "Good management of this resource is crucial. It can't be done unless scientists can see what is really happening to the fish."
The use of ArcView has already proved helpful in making better use of scarce resources in Africa. The southwestern nation of Namibia has a vast coastline and only two boats and one aircraft to monitor the fishing fleet. But the fleet has to report the time and place of its catch when it docks. These reports can be plotted using GIS and correlated with weather or other data so that the next year, the expected position of the fleet can be predicted. "If catches were falling and we suspected pollution was the cause, we could display catch and pollution datasets together on-screen," says Aguilar-Manjarrez. "If there were a clear correlation between the two, or none at all, we would know whether we were right or not. But GIS is even more useful with partial correlations because we can instantly incorporate other factors and search for a subtler reason."
"The open ocean is seen as a new opportunity for the seaward expansion of aquaculture," Kapetsky adds. "GIS could be used to assist developing countries estimate their open ocean aquaculture potential while at the same time increase their capacities for spatial analyses in support of open ocean development and management."
In 2007, Kapetsky and Aguilar-Manjarrez conducted a reconnaissance study, available online at the GISFish site, that illustrates how downloadable data can be used with remote sensing and GIS to estimate open ocean aquaculture potential in countries' exclusive economic zones (EEZs).
"When you work with data geographically, it gives you new insights – undetected patterns, hidden trends, and distributions start to emerge," says ESRI president Jack Dangermond. "The use of GIS will help tremendously with the FAO's worthy goals of alleviating poverty and hunger in developing nations."
FAO's FIMA continually seeks opportunities to cooperate with other organizations in the realm of GIS, remote sensing, and mapping, particularly in the area of training, to improve the sustainability of aquaculture and inland fisheries.
More Information
For more information, contact José Aguilar-Manjarrez, fishery resource officer, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (e-mail: jose.aguilarmanjarrez@fao.org), or James McDaid Kapetsky, aquatic consultant (e-mail: cfastinc@bellsouth.net), or visit GISFish on the Web (www.fao.org/fi/gisfish). |
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