Spatiotemporal dynamics analysis of aquaculture zones and its impact on green tide disaster in Haizhou Bay, China.

ABSTRACT

With the rapid marine economic development, the problem of the marine ecological environment has become progressively prominent. Mariculture monitoring plays an essential role in sustaining ecological stability, rational planning, and green economic development of sea areas. Using the Landsat image, the raft-mariculture area information of Haizhou Bay and its adjacent southern waters were extracted by the object-oriented classification method based on remote sensing techniques. Landscape pattern index and principal component analysis were used to analyze the spatiotemporal expansion and structural changes of mariculture areas, and to quantify the effects of natural, socio-economic factors on the spatiotemporal variations of mariculture areas. This study discusses the correlation between the mariculture area and the outbreak scale of Enteromorpha Enteromorpha green tide. Results show that the object-oriented classification method has the highest accuracy, with total classification accuracy and Kappa coefficient of more than 90% and 0.79, respectively. The total area, patch density, and landscape shape index of mariculture areas in Haizhou Bay increase yearly, which demonstrates that the heterogeneity and fragmentation increase with the expansion of the mariculture area. The landscape pattern changes in the mariculture area are predominantly impacted by annual mean sea surface temperature (SST), annual average wind speed, social development level, and population density, etc. The larger the area of raft-aquaculture, the wider the outbreak scale of the Enteromorpha prolifera disaster. Study results can provide scientific references for the further development of mariculture in Haizhou Bay and marine environmental protection.