Fig. 27: PFZ Web-GIS Page at https://incois.gov.in

Objectives

y To provide potential fishing zone advisories to enhance the lives and livelihoods of the fishermen community. y To provide ocean state forecasts to the stakeholders for safety at sea. y To provide ocean data services to a wide range of stakeholders, research organizations, academia, and coastal communities

Stakeholders Involved

Space Applications Centre, NRSC, FSI, Central Fishery Research Institutes, Academia, State Fishery Departments, fishermen, Indian Navy, Indian Coast Guard, merchant and passenger shipping agencies, offshore oil & gas exploration agencies and research organizations.

Solution and Implementation

1. Potential Fishing Zone (PFZ) Advisory Service: PFZ advisories refer to the imported, converted, and interpreted data derived from geophysical parameters such as Sea Surface Temperature (SST), Chlorophyll-a, Kd-490 (Water Clarity), etc. retrieved from satellite imagery for identification of the potential locations of fish aggregation. These vectors are not understandable directly by the illiterate fishermen community and must be converted into an interpretable format for them. GIS is extensively used in the operational generation of PFZ advisories through the creation of a digital database spanning the country’s coastline, major fish landing centres and lighthouses, retrieved by the digitisation of national hydrographic charts. The delineated PFZ lines in the form of vector coverages are overlaid on these base maps. To make more readable and usable form, these PFZ maps were converted into PFZ text information by creating a GIS Model using near-point analysis.

Fig. 27: PFZ Web-GIS Page at https://incois.gov.in