Marine aquaculture: ecosystem-friendly use of marine resources
Prof. Dr. Bela H. Buck, head of the research group "Marine Aquaculture" at the Alfred Wegener Institute and professor at the Bremerhaven University of Applied Sciences.
Aquaculture
Marine resources
Sustainable food production
Open Ocean
Aquaculture is the generally controlled process of producing aquatic organisms for human consumption or for other uses, such as medicine or biotechnology. Nowadays, aquaculture is the fastest growing food production sector in the world; most of the seafood you can buy in the supermarket today comes from aquaculture, according to the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). Almost two-thirds of global production derives from aquaculture, while the contribution of fishery products is stagnating or declining. One advantage of marine aquaculture is its versatility, as it can be practiced anywhere in the world: from land-based ponds or recirculating aquaculture systems to nearshore marine waters or even far out in the open ocean.
In particular, the transfer of aquaculture from land or fragile coastal waters to the open ocean is playing an increasingly important role in food security in the search for areas for the sustainable production of extractive or low-trophic organisms - organisms, such as algae or bivalves, that are not fed. Worldwide, both commercially and in research projects, such organisms are cultivated in the open ocean. However, a sustainable production in such exposed environments requires a stable technology that can withstand the high waves and strong currents while allowing easy handling during maintenance and harvesting. Our Marine Aquaculture research group at AWI is addressing precisely this issue and is working with international partners to develop a robust system design for the cultivation of different organisms that can withstand high-energy environments, partly remotely controlled, and submerged in the water column. Such innovative developments are not only of a purely technical nature, but also involve biological issues, legal framework conditions, socio-economic studies as well as purely economic feasibility studies.
One of our special areas of expertise at AWI is the combination of different forms of use, also known as multi-use. These are, for example, the cultivation of mussels, oysters and macroalgae in the same areas where offshore wind farms are operated. AWI is pioneering the development of such multi-use concepts and already has over twenty years of experience in this field.
