Abstract
Aquaculture is the fastest-growing animal food production sector and is expected to become increasingly important to meet future food demands. As a landlocked country, Austria’s self-sufficiency rate for fish is rather low with 6% in total and 48% for freshwater fish. Therefore, and in order to enable sustainable growth of the sector while avoiding negative impacts on the aquatic ecosystem and other uses, we developed aquaZone, a decision support tool for sustainable trout farm zoning. Thereby, 30 spatially explicit criteria related to environmental prerequisites, land use, legal constraints and water quality/quantity were defined, collected and classified according to their suitability for sustainable trout production. Criteria were combined in an integrative GIS-based modelling approach in order to perform the first countrywide and spatially-explicit zonation of suitable areas for aquaculture in Austria. Thereby, 7920 suitable areas with a mean size of 8.2 ha located in 1129 out of 5011 sub-basins (23%) were identified. The decision tree assigned the highest variable importance to water temperature, slope, agricultural unit, geology, nitrate retention capacity, fish region, minimum flow and pollution risk. These results should support decision making of investors and authorities in order to avoid conflicts and stranded investments at an early stage.
Highlights
IntroductionPublisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
Figure or 0.8% of Austria are suitable for the establishment of new aquaculture farms
With aquaZone, we have developed an integrative tool for determining suitable zones for sustainable salmonid production in flow-through systems in Austria, which could represent a potential solution for other countries or regions
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Aquaculture is the fastest-growing animal food production sector with an annual growth rate of 5.3% during the period 2001–2018 [1]. In 2014, farmed fish exceeded wild-caught fish for consumption for the first time [2] and provided 52% of the demand for human consumption (i.e., 156 Mt) and 48% of the global fish production (i.e., 179 Mt) in 2018 [1]. Bearing in mind that 34.2% of fish stocks are fished beyond biological sustainability and considering that the demand for fish consumption is expected to increase to 210 Mt by 2050 [3], aquaculture production is expected to become increasingly important [4]
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