MODELING OFFSHORE FINFISH AQUACULTURE IN MOROCCO: A CASE STUDY USING DEPOMOD TO INFORM ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE

The Kingdom of Morocco is seeking to expand offshore aquaculture production along its Atlantic and Mediterranean coastlines.  This priority was elevated as part of the 2012 U.S.-Morocco Free Trade Agreement in which Morocco requested U.S. collaboration on sustainable aquaculture development.  To address this priority, a partnership was established between the Moroccan National Agency for the Development of Aquaculture (ANDA) and NOAA with support by the U.S. Department of State.  Three comprehensive guidelines on modeling, siting, and monitoring with case studies in Morocco were developed to assist with environmental governance of aquaculture development.  Here, we present the environmental modeling case study for proposed net pen aquaculture sites off the immediate coast of Agadir, Morocco. We will discuss the application of DEPOMOD, an aquaculture depositional model that was developed in 1999 by the Scottish Association of Marine Science, Marine Harvest, and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency to predict benthic ecological impacts from marine net pens.  This project provided to NOAA the opportunity to partner with the developers of DEPOMOD to test the updated model (newDEPOMOD) and to assist with model refinement.  Plans are also underway to apply newDEPOMOD to sites planned in the U.S. to further evaluate its capabilities and to offer feedback to the model developers.