A remote sensing approach to explore the available water spread for fisheries development in the reservoirs of Godavari River Basin, Telangana, India

Reservoirs have tremendous fisheries potential amongst the inland water resources and aptly referred as ‘sleeping giants’, as the fish yield potential of these resources are yet to be tapped. Existing gaps in the availability of absolute information and data on the inland water resources hinder the applicability and implementation of various fisheries development programmes, which in turn impact inland fisheries production. The present study was carried out in the reservoirs viz., Sri Ram Sagar, Kaddam and Swarna from the Godavari Basin, covering the period 2016-2021, as a case study to demonstrate the use of remote sensed data in fisheries stock enhancement planning. The perennial and seasonal water spread area of the reservoirs under study, estimated through composite water maps prepared using Sentinel 2A data ranged between 8 to 19 and 4 to 29%, respectively. Further, the potential area for enclosure fish culture (both cage and pen culture) in these reservoirs were found to range between 14.89% (Sir Ram Sagar) to 48.54% (Kaddam). The field validated results revealed less than 0.1% of the perennial water spread area mapped in these reservoirs is under use for cage culture. This highlights under-utilisation of these reservoirs and demonstrates scope for developing enclosure fish culture or other culture-based fisheries for enhancing the fish production. The study also demonstrates the use of geospatial tools in development planning for expanding enclosure fish culture in the reservoirs and in turn enhancing fisheries production from the reservoirs in India. Keywords: Composite water maps, Enclosure fish culture,  Geospatial tools, Godavari River, NDWI, Reservoir, Sentinel 2A data, Water spread area