Aquatic ecological survey

AQUATIC ECOLOGICAL  SURVEY

INTRODUCTION

An aquatic ecological survey can be referred to as the backbone of Fisheries, and the process of planning can be referred to as a survey, according to a popular saying “he who fails to plan, plan to fail”. The aquatic ecological survey deals with proper planning in both capture and culture fisheries; planning (survey) in capture fisheries involve the use of a sophisticated instrument to check the aquatic resources of economic importance prior to fishing activities, while in the culture fisheries it involves the appropriate survey of the vegetation, topography, water source, soil type among others before sitinga fish farm. Therefore, before any project is embarked upon, there is need to survey the land and area where the project is to be done (Creamer, 2009).

Survey in fisheries is the art of determining the relative position of distinctive features on the surface of the earth or beneath the earth, by means of distances, directions and elevation.  According to Anyabine et al. (2010) surveying is the technique and science of accurately determining the terrestrial or three dimensional positions of points and the distances and angles between them. It could also be ascertained by measuring angular, linear or both and representing it on paper to a fixed scale in the form of the Earth surface and the relative positions of the objects therein as projected on a horizontal surface. All surveys fall into two major groups as follows; geodetic survey and plane survey. Within these major divisions in survey, there are survey branches such as: cadastral (land) survey, topographic survey, engineering survey, hydrographic survey, photogrammetric survey, mine survey and satellite survey (Dele, 2012).  

Ecology is an interdisciplinary field that includes biology and earth science. It is the study of interactions between biotic and abiotic factors, also interrelationships among organisms with their environment. Aquatic ecology shows the relationship between aquatic organisms and their physical, chemical and biological environment. Aquatic ecology encompasses all marine and freshwater ecosystems including streams, rivers, lakes, wet-lands, coastal environments and the vast expanses of the open ocean (Huisman, 2011).