Identify and map coastal aquaculture ponds and their drainage and impoundment dynamics

Abstract

Sustainable management of coastal aquaculture ponds could achieve win-win between food and economic benefits and ecological conservation including waterbird. In this study, 5,790 Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 images from July 2021 to June 2022 and 498 Sentinel-1 images from July 2021, August 2021, and June 2022 as supplementary data were collected to calculate multiple water indices. Based on Otsu algorithm to distinguish between water and non-water region and Savitzky-Golay filtering to optimize time series, coastal aquaculture ponds were identified using the SNIC. Furthermore, their drainage and impoundment phases were determined using the Dynamic Time Warping-Kmeans++ method. Finally, a new 30-m resolution dataset at the national scale of China was generated with an overall accuracy greater than 90 % for both the pond map and the drainage and impoundment phases. Our observations revealed that the total area was 7,919.53 km2, with the largest pond area in Shandong Province. Among the coastal aquaculture ponds, 27.95 % were seasonal aquaculture ponds, 70.32 % were yearlong aquaculture ponds, and 1.49 % were abandoned aquaculture ponds. Drainage start dates, end dates, and durations were calculated based on abrupt changes in the water proportion time series. Drainage start dates were concentrated from September to December, while drainage end dates were from January to April. Drainage durations of coastal aquaculture ponds ranged from two weeks to six months, with Shanghai Municipality having the longest drainage durations and Taiwan Province having the shortest drainage durations. The findings could provide scientific support for modifying the drainage and impoundment phases of coastal aquaculture ponds to achieve the win–win goal of improving economic development and protecting waterbirds or improving offshore water quality.