Aquaculture America 2023

February 23 - 26, 2023

New Orleans, Louisiana USA

SATELLITE DRIVEN OYSTER AQUACULTURE SITE SELECTION IN MAINE: FROM SUITABILITY INDEXES TO COUPLED GROWTH MODELS

Thomas Kiffney*, Binbin Jiang, Gabe Hesketh, Romain Lavaud, Emmanuel Boss, Damian Brady

 

University of Maine

Darling Marine Center

Walpole, ME 04573 USA

thomas.kiffney@maine.edu

 



Oyster aquaculture has seen rapid expansion in Maine with a 5-fold increase in harvest value over the last 10 years. As the industry grows, prospective farmers need to choose new farm sites. Most shellfish aquaculture sites are located in narrow estuaries and bays along Maine’s convoluted coast. Nearby areas can have vastly different environmental parameters vital for oyster growth such as food, measured through chlorophyll a and turbidity, and temperature. These parameters determine the time it takes an oyster to reach market size and ultimately the financial feasibility of the farm. In an effort to reduce the risk of site selection in nearshore environments we use high resolution (100m and under) satellite imagery from Landsat 8 and Sentinel 2 to gather farm scale environmental data across the state. This work highlights previous results validating high resolution products to generate suitability indexes for aquaculture and demonstrates the next phase of satellite site selection with oyster growth models forced with remotely sensed products. We generated daily climatologies of sea surface temperature from almost a decade of Landsat 8 data (2013-2022) while food levels were derived from four years of sentinel 2 data. (2016-2020) An eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) dynamic energy budget model was validated with in-situ data from 4 farm sites and coupled to the satellite data to explore time to market variability along the coast of Maine. Our work aims to reduce the risk of site selection for oyster industry in Maine, but the framework can be used to site other existing and emerging in the near shore environment.