Detection of aquaculture structures using Sentinel-1 data

Abstract

In recent years the FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department has been carrying out strategies and policies aimed at improving the regulatory laws on aquaculture and fisheries activities for increasing both the management efficiency and environmental protection associated to this task. In this field, the role of temporal and geo-spatial analysis of remotely sensed data has been acknowledged as an important source of complementary information for inventory and monitoring of such marine facilities. In case of radar imaging sensors there exists a scarce literature devoted to the topic which has been focused on the detection of coastal and offshore aquaculture structures. This contribution explores the sensitivity of Sentinel-1 coherent dual-polarised data for two different aquaculture structures, i.e. fish cages and floating mussel production systems. Our hypothesis concerns the usefulness of this tool to develop spatial planning programs of aquaculture and to analyse the relationship of selected locations with oceanographic processes.