Decision support system for aquaculture stakeholders in Greece in the context of climate change

Climate change constitutes an increasing concern for aquaculture. The uncertainty surrounding the future implications of this fact coupled with the financial importance of the sector necessitate the development of appropriate frameworks and tools that can support management decisions and ensure the sustainability of future aquaculture production.

Facilitated by emerging information technologies, decision support systems (DSSs) are becoming increasingly popular in sectors of primary production and deal with various aspects of decision-making from the operational to the strategic level.

This computer-based Decision Support System, developed within the EU funded Climefish project simulates and visualises the impacts of different climate change scenarios on Greek aquaculture, using the European sea bass and the meagre as model species and including also economic forecasts. It incorporates the feedback of stakeholders (representatives of both the industry and the public administration) specifically involved during the work through dedicated meetings.

The model uses biological and economic information as input data to explore how different farming practices will alter the performance of the sector under future environmental scenarios. The DSS structure includes the coupled biological and economic model as well as a local database and a user interface. The operation of the software is performed in two phases. Firstly, the user selects the climate scenario (RCP 4.5 or 8.5) the characteristics of the farm, the species and the rearing conditions from the predefined options, and the biological output is retrieved from the database. The biological output is then used as input for the economic simulation that provides some economic forecasts of the farm. Furthermore a risk and opportunity assessment is also provided.

The Greek ClimeFish DSS uses open source software components and the final version of the tool will be freely available for its use on the ClimeFish webpage.