Studies on Integrated GIS and AHP for Marine Aquaculture Site Selection in Penghu Cove in Taiwan

Marine cage culture has been developed quickly in recent years from land-based operation transfer to marine cage culture by government policy in Taiwan. Therefore, the suitable site selection is an important premised and key factor for successful marine cage culture and sustainable development in the future. Especially, it’s greatly influences economic viability by determining capital outlay and affecting running costs, production and mortality. Hence, the decision factors such as climate factors, geographic environmental factors, bio-environmental factors and social-economic factors are more important for site selection. With the rapid development of marine cage culture that creates a growing need for coastal zone environment analyses, a complex task need one useful tools for kinds of analysis is the Geographic Information System (GIS). This study use AHP (analytic hierarchy process) to evaluate the criteria weight for site selection. From AHP analysis, the weights of suitability of the four GIS grid themes were 0.322, 0.410, 0.127 and 0.141, respectively. The result shows that the geographic environmental factors are the most important factors in selection suitable marine culture sits in Penghu cove in Taiwan. At the meanwhile, by using ArcMap, a GIS software package, a suitable map was made based on the selected grid themes. The suitable sites for marine cage culture development identified on the individual GIS grid themes, the GIS software and AHP method can be integrated to select objectively the optimal sites for marine cage culture development.