Transforming the land/seascapes of fisheries & aquaculture

The land and seascapes of fisheries and aquaculture are transformed by those activities and are being transformed by the activities of other place makers.

The roles of fisheries and aquaculture as identifiers and makers of places lie at the heart of the research, which draws on qualitative and quantitative studies of the use of space to develop theoretical understandings of their social construction and use, and the effects of various management behaviours on the transformation of such places.

Current specific project foci

Simulating the occupation of marine space

Key researchers – Dr Hamish Rennie, Dr Crile Doscher, Dr Clare Churcher, Prof.  (Lincoln University), Dr Roger White (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Dr Lars Brabyn (Waikato University).

 This project, an international collaboration, seeks to model and simulate human interactions with fisheries and aquaculture to provide decision support systems that aid visualisation of desirable futures, and testing of alternative ways of reaching them, in the context of global and local environmental and social change. The research, commenced in 2007, builds on previous research on aquaculture development and simulating lobster fisher behaviour. It aims to develop an integrated agent-based and cellular automata model, linked with GIS, to simulate future occupation of New Zealand’s marine space.

This will provide an aid to analysing human relationships with aquaculture and marine space generally and provide a spatial decision support system (DSS) to aid decision-makers.