Interpretation of sea lice connectivity patterns among Scottish Farm Management Areas

Scottish Marine and Freshwater Science Vol 11 No 4
Climatological (“average year”) flow fields from the Scottish Shelf Model (SSM) have been used to estimate the degree of connectivity between Scottish finfish aquaculture Farm Management Areas (FMA) using off-line particle tracking simulations of virtual organisms (“particles”) representing the infective phases of sea lice. The analysis carried out in this document is based on presence-absence of connections between FMAs as well as connection probabilities above a defined threshold. A weighting (relative to the consented biomass of farms within each FMA) was also applied to the probabilities to give a more realistic scenario.