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Journal of Coastal Zone Management AbstractMarine cage culture has been developed quickly in recent years from land-based operation transfer to marine cage culture by government policy in Taiwan. Therefore, the suitable site selection is an important premised and key factor for successful marine cage culture and sustainable development in the future. Especially, it's greatly influences economic viability by determining capital outlay and affecting running costs, production and mortality. Hence, the decision factors such as climate factors, geographic environmental factors, bio-environmental factors and social-economic factors are more important for site selection. This study use AHP (analytic hierarchy process) to evaluate the criteria weight for site selection. From AHP analysis, the weights of suitability of the four Geographic Information System (GIS) grid themes were 0.322, 0.410, 0.127 and 0.141, respectively. The result shows that the geographic environmental factors are the most important factors in selection suitable marine culture sits in Penghu cove in Taiwan. At the meanwhile, by using ArcMap, a GIS software package, a suitable map was made based on the selected grid themes. The suitable sites for marine cage culture development identified on the individual GIS grid themes, the GIS software and AHP method can be integrated to select objectively the optimal sites for marine cage culture development.

Taiwan is surrounded by the sea. As regards to its lands and resources are limited. To develop the marine culture is the government's fishery policy in recent decades. However, in the process of vigorous sea culture, if there is a lack of marine environmental related policies, marine environmental monitoring systems or marine environmental monitoring indicators, it will have an impact on the ecological environment, environmental carrying capacity and environmental conditions of the aquaculture environment. Therefore, this paper reviews and focuses on the environmental conditions, management and development strategies of Taiwan's marine aquaculture. Moreover, to propose strategies to enable the future development of Taiwan marine aquaculture environment and aquaculture industry to get better development.

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