Implementing a Spatial Model to Derive Potential Fishing Zones in the Northern Bay of Bengal Lying Adjacent to West Bengal Coast,India

Potential fishing zones (PFZ’s) are those regions where the fishes aggregate due to an abundance of food and they are demarcated by tracing those regions in the ocean, where a sharp sea surface temperature (SST) gradient along with optimal chlorophyll (Chl) concentration co-exists at a given time. In this regard, Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) disseminates the daily PFZ forecasts in Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea to aid the fishermen community. The present study is an endeavor to develop a local spatial model derived Potential Fishing Zone (PFZ) in the northern Bay of Bengal (nBoB) lying adjacent to the West Bengal coast. Satellite derived SST and chlorophyll data obtained for two consecutive winter seasons of 2010–11 and 2011–12 were used to generate line density (LD) raster. Shapefiles of INCOIS predicted PFZs were overlaid on these LD raster to extract the corresponding pixel values. Histogram ranges of the extracted pixels were fixed and same values lying in the LD raster of both SST and chlorophyll other than INCOIS PFZs were detected by a spatial model in ERDAS. The PFZs thus derived were validated against the ground fish catch data and it was observed that good fish catch was seen in the model derived additional PFZs also. The catch per unit effort (CPUE) values was found to be very close to that of the CPUE value of PFZ advisories of INCOIS. However, the CPUE in the non PFZ areas were significantly lower than the former two categories.