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Development And Application Of Geographic Information System

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Development and Application of Geographic Information System (GIS) in Marine Fishery Realm

During a long period of time, realm of marine fishery has always been focusing more on subjects like morphology, taxonomy, ethology, physiology, cytology and breeding science, instead of on the distribution of marine species and the interaction between fish and marine environmental conditions (Kracker, 1999), until Geographic Information System (GIS) was widely used by different disciplines as an effective tool of tackling spatial problems. As a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of spatial or geographical data, GIS was firstly used in marine fishery realm in 1980s (Kapetsky & et al, 1987), and …show more content…

Besides distribution map, GIS was also used by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to draw a series of maps (Populus & Lantieri, 1991) that reflected land use types of intertidal zones and seabed, coastal lines and the depth contour lines.

Till the early 1990s, the connection between GIS and marine fishery became much closer; GIS began to be applied for electronic atlas. Skagex electronic atlas was completed by Ostrowski (1994), embracing physic physical, chemical, biological and hydrological parameters of the territorial seas of 7 Baltic states. Also in this phase, The British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC, Ramster,1993) implemented the UK Digital Marine Atlas (UKDMAP), which integrated the marine information of geology, geomorphology, meteorology, hydrology, especially the fishery areas, conservation areas, islands and breeding ground of British territorial seas. These atlases have already possessed the fundamental functions of GIS such as superimposition data searching, distance calculation.

In the mid and late 1990s, the application of GIS in marine fishery realm was further improved. Pollitt (1994) built a Fishery Protection Information System (FPIS) by the comprehensive utilization of GIS, expert systems and database systems, providing service for the Irish fishery patrol according to the local laws, information of ships and geological features. Meaden and his group (2000)

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