It has been a busy few months with the EcoAqua project.
We have completed our sampling campaigns, all relevant data is now being analysed and will be presented to our partners in the coming weeks and months.
Some of the results that can be expected include:
- Four life cycle assessment (LCA) studies on salmon smolt, rainbow trout and perch production in Ireland.
- A comprehensive report on water quality within aquaculture catchments – covering: water chemistry, plants, river insects (macroinvertebrates), hyrdomorphology and flow.
- The application of building information modeling (BIM) and LCA to aquaculture infrastructure.
- Bi-monthly survey of water through the farm, monitoring nutrients and solids loading.
- Preliminary analysis of the energy potential of aquaculture solids waste and it’s use as a biofuel.
- Catchment scale nutrient budget, comparing aquaculture activities with other food production systems.
- Microbiological profiling of a split pond system focusing on seasonal variations.
- Trialing of remote monitoring technologies and their use for freshwater aquaculture systems.
- Ecotoxicological survey of a split pond system.
Check back on the site regularly as we update and publish our results.
Some figures on EcoAqua:
A team of 12 researchers from NUI Galway and AIT with skills and expertise ranging from civil engineering and microbiology to freshwater science and numerical modelling.
The team has analysed over 100 river spot samples, over 140 twenty four hour composite samples, identified in excess of 20,000 macroinvertebrates, traveled over 8,000 km to collect data and produced over 17 presentations/posters/papers on the topic of freshwater aquaculture in Ireland.
