UAS Air Photos of Lake Victoria (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania)

Abstract

This project investigates the dynamic links between the ecology of Lake Victoria (a natural system), the economy of its surrounding fisheries (a human system), and the bridge between these systems created by aquaculture. Within the natural subsystem, dynamics of fish abundance are regulated by predation, competition, and lake productivity. Within the human subsystem, dynamics of demand for fish are driven by local fish consumption and global fish exports. The natural subsystem supplies fish catch to the human subsystem, and the human subsystem impacts fisheries through fishing effort. Aquaculture links these systems through additional production of fish and response to demand. This research will investigate the effects of aquaculture on wild fisheries and food commodity markets through an ecosystem accounting model (MIMES) that links lake biological dynamics with human socio-economic dynamics. New environmental, biological and socio-economic data will be collected through trawl, acoustic, and questionnaire-based surveys. New and existing data will be synthesized with GIS. The expansion of a forecasting model (International Futures or IFs) will investigate effects of global demand dynamics on our system. Finally, MIMES will be used to assess scenarios of aquaculture growth and tradeoffs in fish population dynamics, food security, and income security in the Lake Victoria basin.