The unregulated fast growth has raised environmental issues and conflicts in many coastal states, leading to litigation and regulation issues. Thus present land utilization for aquaculture planning requires multi-dimensional approach integrating multiple layers of land use, water quality, soil characteristics and infrastructure in GIS platform. The present study discuss about the geospatial technique developed and its validation in different coastal states on India.
Aquaculture is regarded as a rapidly expanding sector for food production. In India, shrimp aquaculture has grown tremendously since 1990, by utilizing the land area of 2 lakh ha of coastal land to contributes 8 % of global aquaculture production of 185.4 million tonnes in 2022. However, the area expansion continues to encounter numerous challenges due to insufficient spatial planning. Some of the environmental conflicts include conversion of lakes, mangroves and agricultural lands to aquaculture farms and salinization of soil and drinking water resources adjacent to aquaculture farms. Earlier survey estimates indicated that 0.65 million ha in the east coast and 0.55 million ha in the west coast are suitable for the development of brackishwater aquaculture in India. But the present area of 2 lakh ha cannot be linked to the 1.2 million ha statistics, as the present aquaculture development is on pond based commercial aquaculture. The resource assessment of aquaculture will vary in the present context due to Coastal Aquaculture Authority (CAA) act requirement of environmental restrictions and compulsory buffer zone between land classes for the development of aquaculture. Multiple spatial criteria such as land resources availability, water quality, soil characteristics, water availability and environmental regulations needs to be considered for planning the aquaculture.
The present study used four dimensional approach viz land use, soil and water characteristics in identifying suitable areas for sustainable aquaculture. Remote sensing and GIS have been used for the decision making as it permits additional spatial data incorporation and advanced analysis to identify the suitable sites from the unused coastal resources without multi-user conflicts.
Studies have been carried out with different suitable criteria for cage aquaculture and pond based aquaculture planning. Combining multiple factors and land allocation for other sector development, multi criteria decision support analysis indicates land available for expansion in addition to present aquaculture. This methodology provides information on the extent, location, prior land-use of potential area for aquaculture with soil and water characteristics. The study has been validated and being used for assessing the resources availability for the