Preliminary experiments on application of participatory GIS in trawlfisheries of Karnataka and its prospects in marine fisheries resourceconservation and management

Geographic Information System (GIS) has become a part of our day today life in empowering institutions to formulate acceptable solutions in societal issues. More recently, public participatory GIS (PPGIS) and participatory GIS (PGIS) are viewed as more efficient tools in solving social and resource conservation issues, which empower communities those who are often ignored in traditional GIS practices. In fisheries, PGIS concept was first reported from Canada and on these lines pioneering efforts of involving concept of PGIS in fisheries is being attempted in Karnataka, where the geospatial data on fishing, catch and samples of fish caught by commercial fishing vessels were shared with the research organization and the data and samples thus shared were processed by fishery and GIS experts to come out with various tools for fishery management and resource conservation of the region. The study showed that the trawlers from Mangalore carried out trawling operations from sea off Calicut in the south (75 o E, 11 o N) to off Ratnagiri in the north (73.5 o