Impact on fishing patterns and life style changes of Kanyakumari fishermen due to fading potential fishing zones

Abstract

The rise in global temperature and unpredictable storms including tsunamis which could eventually affects the ocean ecosystems, fishing community, and consequently the raising ocean levels rising. These effects in turn has the impact on changing the Potential fishing zones which directly affects the fishermen communities by forcing them to face several challenges during their regular catch. The Kanyakumari fishermen mostly depend on the pelagic fishes that live at the certain depth according to the ocean floor classification. The PFZ data received from Indian National Center for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS), Hyderabad for the period from November 2003 to February 2011 of Kanyakumari coast is analyzed temporally for the continuous varying fishing spots by clustering them. The data had split into two clusters based on seasons and sub clustered according to depth and distance on which the data mining techniques of temporal and spatial locality are applied. The outcome of this technique results the information to predict the change in fish movement of Kanyakumari coast current and the near future. This study exhibits the moving PFZ which comprises the gradual increase in depth and distance due to the climatic conditions and overfishing. © 2013 IEEE.