Michigan State University researchers have received a nearly $800 thousand grant from NASA for a three-year study of how aquaculture in Asia is affecting its land.
Aquaculture is the farming of organisms, like fish and shellfish, in water. A huge percentage of the world’s aquaculture production happens in Asia. But poor farming practices can lead to environmental damage.
Through a funding grant from NASA Land Cover/Land Use Change, MSU researcher Lin Yan and his team plan to use satellite images of aquaculture farms to learn how the industry is affecting the use of land and the presence of vegetation. Yan is an assistant professor at MSU's Center for Global Change and Earth Observations.
"We study satellite images so we can know what's going on on the Earth's surface and also we can know what happened in the past," he said.
Based on that research, Yan says his team will try to glean how past aquaculture practices affect current ones.
“We will look what [are] the drivers and constraints of the aquaculture changes, and the climate is a big factor behind these changes,” Yan added.
He says they will also try to determine how current practices might affect future production.
“So we can know [how] aquaculture will increase, will be stable or possibly decrease because of something, so we can be prepared for these changes,” he added.
Yan is hoping to use the data collected to help inform aquaculture farmers.
"We may be able to find out that in some places the way they do the aquaculture is not sustainable, and then, when that happens, we can provide some feedback to the local countries," he said.
NASA will provide Yan and his team with satellite images of aquaculture farms in Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, and Thailand. This is the second time Yan has received a grant from NASA. His previous collaboration with NASA involved looking at satellite images of agricultural crop fields to determine how land use and land cover were being affected.
