Suitable areas for aquaculture in Liguria from Dapueto et al., 2015.

• Aquaculture
• MSP Italy
• Thyrrenian Sea
• Tools4msp
  • MSP_Italy

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280245416_A_spatial_multi-criteria_evaluation_for_site_selection_of_offshore_marine_fish_farm_in_the_Ligurian_Sea_Italy 

Mariculture is a relatively new activity that is expanding globally and interacts with other coastal uses.Therefore, it is necessary to allocate suitable sites from environmental, economic and social points ofview, involving different stakeholders in the decision-making process. In particular, in the Ligurian Sea(Italy), for its environmental characteristics and tradition, fish farming should be further boosted and anaccurate marine spatial planning should be done. This paper presents a spatial multi-criteria evaluation(SMCE) addressed to identify suitable areas for siting offshore medium size fish farms in the Ligurian Seaat the regional scale. The SMCE procedure follows an integrated approach that can be potentially adaptedand applied to any coastal system. The site selection is based on the definition of criteria that assess theirsuitability and on conditions related to the entire study area. Suitability values are ranked on a scale from1 (suitable) to 10 (optimal). More than 9000 ha were identified and almost 40% of this area gets highsuitability values, from 7 to 9, pointing out the untapped potential for Ligurian marine coastal zone.Results demonstrate that our SMCE, and in particular its procedure, allows identifying the most suitableareas in an easy and quick way and solving effectively the complex spatial problem of suitable site se-lection for fish farming.

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