GIBD members receive $34,993 in funding from South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium to develop a GIS-based siting tool for South Carolina mariculture site selection. The project team includes Dr. Zhenlong Li (PI), Dr. Cuizhen Wang (Co-PI), and Huan Ning.
The shellfish industry in coastal South Carolina (SC) weighs heavily in culturing and harvesting eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) and hard clam (Mercenaria spp.) in tidal creeks and estuaries. Oyster farming in SC is relatively new and is in a smaller scale than those well-established mariculture industries in other Atlantic and Gulf coastal states. However, its economic and public benefits deserve to be recognized. The total oysters farmed in SC has boomed from 139,178 in 2014 to over 1.3 million in 2020 [1]. As filter feeders, these oysters could produce 10 billion gallons of clean water as estimated by SC Department of Natural Resources (SCDNR).
To address the critical need of shellfish siting solutions in South Carolina, this project aims to develop an online GIS-based tool to facilitate the process of selecting an appropriate location for shellfish mariculture lease. The tool will be used by current shellfish growers and potential new growers to successfully locate usable, environmentally and economically beneficial sites as they work through the regulatory process. The longer-term vision of the proposed work is to extend this tool as a sustainable GIS-based mariculture decision-making system that is able to intelligently integrate the multiple siting factors and consider the ever-changing environment with advanced technologies (e.g., spatiotemporal modeling and artificial intelligence) to bolster the healthy and sustainable growth of the South Carolina shellfish aquaculture industry.
