A Data-Driven Modeling and Computational Framework for Region-Specific Green Fishery Optimization

Aquaculture development increasingly faces the dual requirement of increasing economic output and reducing environmental pressure under limited aquatic resources. Existing studies have examined aquaculture efficiency, environmental performance, and production optimization separately, but region-specific strategies that jointly address economic improvement and environmental-emission mitigation remain insufficiently developed. This study proposes a data-driven modeling and computational framework to identify regional green modes of fishery production, with dual properties of higher economic output and lower environmental-emission intensity. In this framework, data-analysis techniques, including missing-value imputation, regional aquaculture classification, nonlinear variable reconstruction, and Lasso regression, are integrated with scenario-based optimization models under alternative management priorities. By applying the proposed framework to provincial fishery data from China during 2017–2024, the results reveal clear heterogeneity in green fishery production modes across different aquatic-resource systems. In particular, under the economic-priority scenario with emission-reduction constraints, the optimized outputs increase by 11.19% and 6.54% in Zone 1 (an inland freshwater system) and Zone 2 (a coastal-intensive system), respectively. Under the environmental-priority scenario with required economic-growth condition, moderate emission-reduction potential is identified in Zone 1, whereas substantial emission reduction is observed in Zone 2. Furthermore, in view of the determined green fishery strategy by our framework, the nearest-optimum province is identified for each zone. By elasticity analysis, it is further found that technology-extension funding and fishery medicine expenditure are two synergistic production investments in Zones 1 and 2, whereas seedling and feed-related investments display properties of region-specific coordination. Summarily, the proposed computational framework in this paper provides an efficient tool of analyzing the regional green fishery production strategies and the regional heterogeneity in virtue of data-driven modeling and advanced optimization techniques.