Aquaculture and fisheries
In parallel with the catastrophic decline in capture fisheries,
there has been significant expansion in aquaculture development
worldwide. These activities are becoming increasingly important to
produce fish and shellfish for worldwide consumption, and
especially in ensuring food security for much of the developing
world.
Understanding the need to develop sustainable operations is
providing the key to realizing the longer term benefits and
viability of aquaculture development. This is helped by adoption of
the "ecosystem approach" as a basis for site development and
introduction of best practice guidelines to cover all aspects of
managing aquaculture operations.
Similarly, it is being more widely accepted that the long term
future of capture fisheries depends crucially on implementation and
enforcement of measures to ensure their sustainable management.
Although the necessary mechanisms are not yet in place through
international institutions, the consequences of profligate and
uncontrolled exploitation across all world fisheries is finally
reaching an end point. Developing and managing a sustainable
aquaculture industry depends not only on application of scientific
understanding of the natural environment, but also respect for
traditional knowledge and integration of social and economic issues
at the very early design stage of developments.
In addition to
enforcement measures to control exploitation, rehabilitation of
capture fisheries will require initiatives such as the introduction
of No-Take-Zones and protection of nurseries and breeding
areas.
Creative use of marine space to accommodate these and other uses
will again be critically dependent on understanding ecosystem
functioning as a basis for protecting and managing resources in
order to optimize the benefits for everyone.
PML research applications:
- Use of remote sensing to support strategic
studies for aquaculture development
- Determination of baseline conditions and
ecosystem functioning in potential aquaculture development
locations
- Modelling site specific aquaculture
potential (including shellfish and algae) as well as carrying
capacity in multi-species systems
- Novel technology for monitoring harmful
algal blooms (HABs), water quality and food supply.
Examples of recent projects
Sustainable
Mariculture in Northern Irish Lough Ecosystem
(SMILE)
SMILE is a two year project, which is aimed at sustainable
fishery management to establish functional models at the
lough scale, by describing key environmental variables and
processes, aquaculture activities and their interactions.
SMILE will evaluate exploitation and carrying capacities for
aquaculture in the different loughs, by considering interactions
between cultivated species, for normal and alternative cultivation
practices. The project is examining the effects of over
exploitation on key ecological variables and the bay-scale
environmental effects of different culture strategies.
Sustainable
options for PEople, Catchment and Aquatic Resources
(SPEAR)
Over the last year we have also been working on the EU funded
research project SPEAR, involving a partnership of European,
Chinese and South African institutions. PML’s main role in the
project is to co-ordinate the research on aquatic resources, and
develop prediction of the rates of feeding, nutrient uptake or
excretion and growth across the full natural ranges of temperature,
food availability, food composition and salinity for each main
cultivated species.
We will develop and validate ecological models at culture unit
test sites to allow simulation of the recycling of dissolved and
particulate wastes. These will be converted into practical tools
that can be used locally by marine farmers so that they can
quantify and establish the applied benefits of integrated
multi-species aquaculture. Such benefits include capitalising on
the use of seaweeds as biological nutrient removal systems and the
removal of undesirable particles by filter-feeding shellfish.