‘Ocean management: Linking satellite and socio-economic data to inform sustainability’

Eleni Papathanasopoulou and Hayley Evers-King

KNOTS meeting area
Institute of Development Studies
1-2.30pm on 6 October 2015

Oceans are playing an increasingly important role in countries’ development strategies to address issues such as food security, unemployment and poverty. Aquaculture has been identified as one of the priority areas for these strategies and investment. However, it is unclear where aquaculture farms should be located and what their potential socio-economic impacts will be.

This talk explores how satellite and socio-economic data can be linked and used to address these uncertainties for England, Scotland and South Africa. It will describe the data and images produced by satellite systems in terms of its temporal and spatial resolutions, ability to identify areas of high water quality, harmful algal blooms and monitor environmental change. The benefits of superimposing socio-economic information, such as employment and industries’ economic contributions, onto these satellite images and their use in sustainability analyses will be presented and explored in terms of the added value in combining these datasets. The next steps in developing a web-based visualisation tool to host and provide the capability to query the project’s data will be discussed.

All welcome.

About Dr Papathanasopoulou and Dr Evers-King

Dr Eleni Papathanasopoulou is an economist based at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory using input-output, general equilibrium and macroeconomic perspectives to assess the impacts of changes in the environment to whole economic and social systems. She has recently applied these approaches to estimate the economic impacts of harmful algal blooms (HABs) in England, health cost savings of aquatic physical activities and the social implications of changes in coastal communities. She holds an ESRC-Satellite Applications Catapult fellowship (2015-16) which is funding the work being presented.

Dr Hayley Evers-King is a marine Earth observation scientist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory specialising in the development of novel algorithms and applications for ocean colour satellite data. Her research has involved detection of high biomass (HABs) in South Africa, and assessments of interannual variability of these blooms in coastal regions with developing aquaculture and fishing industries. She is developing capacity for coastal water quality remote sensing using the new generation of high and medium resolution Earth observation satellites.