Potential Fishing Zones Persistence along Southern Tamil Nadu: A Case Study

Indian National Centre Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) develops potential fishing zones (PFZs) advisory maps for the coastal/marine fishing community using satellite technology to forecast fish shoal aggregation. Two hundred and sixty (260 nos) PFZ advisory maps for Southern Tamil Nadu between November 2015 and October 2017 were analysed to determine the possible persistence of the Spatiotemporal relationship with location and depth with PFZ hits. For ease of understanding, the region's fishing areas were divided into seven zones (one-degree grid) and further subdivided into 16 grids from Gopalapattinam of Pudukkottai to Neerodi of Kanyakumari waters, Tamil Nadu. The analyses indicate that the PFZ's area's persistence was more along Thoothukudi waters (Zone 4; 43.21%) and Kanyakumari (Zone 7; 28.43%), with 58 1 and 58 5 hits, respectively. The Chi-square test for goodness of fit (X²= 1320.36) proved a significant difference among the total number of zone-wise hits. The results of bathymetry grid plotting hoped that a maximum number of PFZ hits were in the nearshore (<50 m; 41.5%), followed by the mid-continental shelf (50 to 200 m; 29.7%) and the continental slope (>200 m; 28.8%) regions. The total number of hits was more during the monsoon season (549 hits), followed by pre-monsoon (307 hits), post-monsoon (297 hits), and the least was during the summer season (92 hits). The Chi-square test for independence of attributes (X² = 22.47) of season-wise and region-wise data also concludes that there is a significant association between region and season of occurrences of PFZ hits.