Development of a comprehensive resilient strategy towards climate smart coastal villages through wetland management and aquaculture at Edakochi village in Ernakulam district

Abstract

Regional small wetlands are highly significant for ensuring village level nutritional security as it provides habitat aquaculture. The work mainly focuses on developing a framework for monitoring regional small wetlands through Android App and Portal. The online platform shall be an interface between users (farmers, testing agencies), experts (scientists) and admin (ICAR-CMFRI). The App and Portal focus on strengthening the national small wetland point source database through generation of additional data sets such as water quality profile, sediment quality profile and species profile. The work provides a basic structure for uniform wetland datasets. A wetland was selected at Edakochi village, Ernakulam, Kerala as representative to generate few among the data set. Wetland map of Kochi Taluk was created using QGIS which depicts extend of spread of water bodies. Restoration of the selected wetland was carried out viz side bund strengthening and sluice gate fortification. Water quality before and after restoration was assessed and water quality was found to be improved after restoration. The wetland has been restored and made suitable for aquaculture which could be further carried out by stake holders. Geospatial analysis of the selected wetland viz catchment area, elevation, slope, flow accumulation and drainage were done. The datasets generated could be fed to the online portal or app and the model could be replicated across all regional small wetlands so as to enhance the small wetland resilience.