This Blue Economy Cooperative Research Centre (BE CRC) project will develop models for quantifying aquaculture production in high-energy (offshore) coastal waters. Although primarily focused on salmon and leveraging off an existing benchmarking study on fish selectively bred for offshore conditions, we will also model production of two other taxa: macroalgae and oysters.
All models will be incorporated into a coastal ocean biogeochemical model of southeast Tasmania to explore co-culture and monoculture farming, spatio-temporal variability, and impacts of marine heatwaves on production.
We will also be developing hydroacoustic methods to measure production in-situ. These measurements will be used to ground truth our production models in conjunction with historical data.
To complete this work, we will be integrating a data sharing platform that allows the secure use of both private and public data, which can be used to improve model predictions across a range of environmental conditions, thus extending the domain of applicability.
