Abstract
Shellfish aquaculture has a major socioeconomic impact on coastal areas, thus it is necessary to develop support tools for its management. In this sense, phytoplankton monitoring is crucial, as it is the main source of food for shellfish farming. The aim of this study was to assess the applicability of Sentinel 2 multispectral imagery (MSI) to monitor the phytoplankton biomass at Ebro Delta bays and to assess its potential as a tool for shellfish management. In situ chlorophyll-a data from Ebro Delta bays (NE Spain) were coupled with several band combination and band ratio spectral indices derived from Sentinel 2A levels 1C and 2A for time-series mapping. The best results (AIC = 72.17, APD < 10%, and MAE < 0.7 mg/m3) were obtained with a simple blue-to-green ratio applied over Rayleigh corrected images. Sentinel 2–derived maps provided coverage of the farm sites at both bays allowing relating the spatiotemporal distribution of phytoplankton with the environmental forcing under different states of the bays. The applied methodology will be further improved but the results show the potential of using Sentinel 2 MSI imagery as a tool for assessing phytoplankton spatiotemporal dynamics and to encourage better future practices in the management of the aquaculture in Ebro Delta bays.
Highlights
Shellfish are filter-feeding organisms that feed on different types of suspended particles in the water column, their production is mainly related to phytoplankton availability [1]
The applied methodology will be further improved but the results show the potential of using Sentinel 2 multispectral imagery (MSI) imagery as a tool for assessing phytoplankton spatiotemporal dynamics and to encourage better future practices in the management of the aquaculture in Ebro Delta bays
These results suggest the use of an integrated water column chl-a for remote sensing model calibration and validation in coastal shallow waters, but further research should include data of both bays under different scenarios to prove the validity of this assumption during the year
Summary
Shellfish are filter-feeding organisms that feed on different types of suspended particles in the water column, their production is mainly related to phytoplankton availability [1]. Spain is the leading producer and consumer of bivalves in Europe, Catalonia being the most important producer area in the Spanish Mediterranean, with most of the production concentrated in the Ebro Delta (Figure 1). Bivalve culture is mainly developed inside its two bays, Alfacs and Fangar, representing 1.8% and 6.5% of their respective surfaces [2]. Since 1990, an official monitoring program carried out by the Regional Government of Catalonia establishes a weekly analysis of the phytoplankton community and water physicochemical parameters at different locations of both bays (12 samples per week). The sampling procedure is temporally and spatially limited, so global extrapolations are subject to large uncertainties
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