Modelling the time series of capture fishery and aquacultural production in Iran

The trend of capture fishery and aquaculture production in Iran shows an ascending trend. An estimate of future production may be useful for management purposes and to provide some clues about the effectiveness of the current plans to reach the goals. We used the data provided by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nation (FAO) to model the time series of the production of aquatics in both sectors. The data covered the years 1980-2018. We predicted the production of aquatics until 2025 using autoregressive integrated moving average models. Several techniques were used to estimate the parameters of the model. However, searching the all possible values of the parameters provided the model with the best predictability. According to the selected model, the production of capture fishery will have an ascending trend and increase to 1,513,533 tons in 2025. Aquaculture production will also have an increasing trend, however, the rate of change will be lower than that of the capture fishery. Aquaculture production will reach to 552944 tons in 2025. The forecast is based on the assumption that the rate of changes in the development of capture fishery and aquaculture will remain in the present status. Sudden changes in management practice or environmental conditions may have a remarkable influence on future production.