The suitability assessment on site selection for bottom-seeding scallop culture based on analytic hierarchy process

Scallop culture is an important way of bottom-seeding marine ranching, which is of great significance to improve the current situation of fishery resources. However, there are some problems in site-selection evaluation of marine ranching, such as imperfect criteria system, complex structure, untargeted criteria quantification, etc. In addition, no site-selection evaluation method of bottom-seeding culture areas for scallops is available. Therefore, we established a hierarchy structure model according to the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) theory, in which social, physical, chemical, and biological environments are used as main criteria, and marine functional zonation, water depth, current, water temperature, salinity, substrate type, water quality, sediment quality, red tide, phytoplankton, and Zooplankton are used as sub-criteria, on which a multi-parameter evaluation system is set up. Meanwhile, the dualism method, assignment method, and membership function method were used to quantify sub-criteria, and a quantitative evaluation for the entire criteria was added, including the evaluation and analysis of two types of unsuitable environmental situations. By overall consideration in scallop yield; quality, and marine ranching construction objectives, the weight of the main criteria could be determined. Five grades in the suitability corresponding to the evaluation result were divided, and the Python language was used to create an evaluation system for efficient calculation and intuitive presentation of the evaluation outcome. Eight marine cases were simulated based on existing survey data, and the results prove that the method is feasible for evaluating and analyzing the site selection of bottom-seeding culture areas for scallops under various environmental situations. The proposed evaluation method can be promoted for the site selection of bottom-seeding marine ranching. This study provided theoretical and methodological references for the site selection evaluation of other types of marine ranching.