The University of New Orleans has received $632,880 from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) to provide information technology and fisheries modeling for the sustainable management of Louisiana’s public oyster seed grounds. UNO’s computer science and biological sciences departments are working on the three-year project.
The LDWF is responsible for closely monitoring the size and health of oysters on nearly 1.7 million acres of public water bottoms. Every year, the LDWF conducts a survey on the public oyster seed grounds to determine the size and number of oysters present. Researchers on the project will input this information, along with the acreage of the oyster reef, into a mathematical model. The model, taking into account oyster growth rate and mortality rate, will predict how many oysters fishermen can sustainably harvest without depleting the reef. The entire information system will be hosted by the UNO Department of Computer Science.
“The project establishes a sustainability goal for the oyster fishery, formulates a model for guiding management decisions and merges expertise of the University of New Orleans and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries,” said Thomas Soniat, UNO biological sciences professor of research.
The investigators for the project are Soniat and computer science professors Mahdi Abdelguerfi, Shengru Tu and Fareed Qaddoura.