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This project builds on former research at RICA and UNSW on remediation and management of degraded shrimp ponds (FIS/97/22). The former project identified a need for improved site selection criteria and a land classification scheme for pond-based culture inIndonesia. Many existing site selection criteria in the region do not adequately address environmental constraints or socio-economic issues related to pond-based farming.

 

This project uses multiple methods to identify environmental constraints on various forms of brackishwater aquaculture in Indonesia and intensive shrimp farming in Australia. The research team is conducting surveys to assess environmental conditions, identify problematic soils and other limiting factors, and identify stakeholder needs. In Indonesia, GIS and Remote Sensing is being used to gather and process data at larger scales, and modelling and multivariate analyses are being used to identify associations between farm productivity and environmental conditions and farm management practices. The data analyses are being used to create a new set of site selection criteria for all common forms of brackishwater aquaculture and to generate mapping criteria for land capability maps that will class land units for pond-based farming systems.

 

Research is being conducted in South Sulawesi, Aceh and Lampung to investigate different environmental conditions and farming systems. Where possible, this project has selected study sites at the same location as FIS/2003/027 to underpin the development of joint outputs. Data from study sites in Aceh under ACIAR Project FIS/2005/028 have been integrated into the current study.

 

The research has strong linkages with FIS/2003/027. The two projects share some study sites, have combined their research findings, and use GIS modelling and other techniques, to create a combined coastal aquaculture classification scheme to facilitate the development of mariculture and brackishwater aquaculture with minimal environmental and socio-economic impacts. The research team is also developing a draft map series for coastal aquaculture in South Sulawesi as a basis for future work at other locations in Indonesia.

 

 

 

 

AIMS' expertise on tropical coastal marine ecology will link with research on the environmental effects of fish cages being undertaken in Indonesia at the Research Institute for Coastal Aquaculture (RICA), in Maros, South Sulawesi. For the Indonesian component of the work, the land-based aquaculture ACIAR team is developing mapping and planning tools based upon the environmental work conducted by AIMS and Indonesian partners. An ecological model will extend the results of this study to a broader range of environments and will extend the results of the project to provide the predictive capacity necessary to estimate environmental effects of fish cage culture planned in new areas.

 

Measurements of the environmental effects of sea cages are being made in three locations. The main study site is at Awarange Bay, Barru Regency in South Sulawesi. RICA staff regularly visit the area and collect time-series data of water and sediment quality in the vicinity of sea cages. Students from the Centre for Coral Reef Studies at Hasanuddin University, Makassar, contributed ecological studies of the coast of Barru, and AIMS conducted two field trips to the area in 2006 and 2007, in order to measure key physico-chemical and ecological processes. These data have been combined to construct a nutrient budget for Awarange Bay, Barru, that will then be incorporated into the modelling products. Parallel studies have also been undertaken in Pegametan Bay, Bali by RICA, and at Bathurst Island, Northern Territory Australia, by AIMS. The diversity of these study sites enable the results to be applied to a broad range of coastal habitats, and facilitate the application of planning tools developed for South Sulawesi to other areas of Indonesia.

 

Though a diverse array of models is available for coastal ecosystems and for estimating the fate of aquaculture wastes, none are directly applicable to fish cage culture in tropical environments. The model developed by this project will accommodate a diverse array of pollutant inputs from non-aquaculture sources, and will be flexible enough to place aquaculture impacts in the context of whole of ecosystem (i.e. at the level of estuary/embayment) processes. The model will be broadly applicable across a wide range of tropical environments, from clear-water coral reef situations (e.g. Pegametan Bay) to highly turbid, macrotidal mangrove environments (Bathurst Island). This component of the project will draw upon existing and developing data sets, as well as data directly acquired by RICA, AIMS and Hasanuddin University.  The effectiveness of the model was tested in a verification exercise in 2007 at Lampung, where development of sea cages is well advanced.