Forecasting quarterly landings of total fish and major pelagic fishes and modelling the impacts of climate change on Bombay duck along India’s north-western Gujarat coast

Abstract

Quarterly landings or catches of total fishes and the major pelagic fish species, were forecasted using the methods and models viz. autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), non-linear autoregressive (NAR) artificial neural network (ANN), autoregressive integrated moving average with exogenous inputs (ARIMAX), non-linear autoregressive with external (exogenous) inputs (NARX) artificial neural network. The models were also developed by considering only two important variables (differ for total fish and selected fish species) obtained from the ANN model. These simplified models proved nearly as good in their predictions. Simulated sea surface temperature (SST) for the A2 climate change scenario was used as an input for the NARX model to estimate the catches of Bombay duck over a short term (2020 – 2025) and a long term (2030 – 2050) with the last two years’ (2012 – 2013) average catch of training data as a benchmark. The catches increased on average by 41 % in the short term but decreased by 17.72 % in the long term.