Healthy Ecosystems

Engineering A Low-Cost Kelp Aquaculture System for Community-Scale Seaweed Farming at Nearshore Exposed Sites via User-Focused Design Process

Lead PI: Adam St Gelais Authors: Adam St-Gelais, David Fredriksson, Tobias Dewhurst, Zachary Miller-Hope, Barry Antonio Costa-Pierce, Kathryn Johndrow, Date: 2022 Abstract: For over 50 years, government fishery agencies have recognized the need to transition excess fishing capacity in coastal waters to aquaculture. For the most part, investment strategies to move wild capture and harvest efforts into […]

Assessment of Aquaculture Structure Resilience to Environmental Change

Project Description Two significant challenges to offshore aquaculture are loading from storms and the costs of anchoring equipment at depth. Much of the anchoring expense is from installation, where barge/vessel size, a limited supply of advanced anchor installation equipment and expertise, and risk associated with over water operations drive costs. A critical objective for marine […]

Impact of Shellfish Aquaculture on Benthic-Pelagic Coupling

Project Description Polychaete worms and other infaunal species residing in marine sediments create bioturbation (mixing and overturn of sediments) through their feeding, tube-building, burrowing, and ventilating activities. These activities influence nutrient fluxes between the sediments and overlying water, and the composition of sedimentary communities. Changes in organic deposition can significantly alter community structure and the […]

Species Specific Stable Isotope Fractionation Baseline between Oysters and Algae

Project Description Stable isotopes are commonly used understand predator-prey interactions and food web dynamics. Stable isotope 15N is enriched with increasing trophic levels while stable isotope 13C remains relatively consistent across trophic levels. When these two isotopes are considered together, they can indicate predator-prey interactions in a food web. The common assumption for all species […]

Attenuating Waves with Kelp Farms

Project Description Coastal cities are vulnerable to risks associated with storms. Typical storm surge and wave damage includes beach erosion, flooding, and impairment of coastal infrastructure. Often hard engineering structures are used to mitigate these influences, though they have adverse impacts to adjacent coastlines and can be viewed unfavorably by society. Soft (or green) engineering […]

Environmental Change and Water Level Variability

Project Description Predictions of the impact of environmental change include increased storm intensity and frequency. To date, most research has focused on studying storm surge. Researchers have typically relied on models to represent idealized scenarios of storm surge behavior. Without observations to capture how storm surge behaves inside an estuary, the actual effects remain a […]

Ecological Interactions of Shellfish Aquaculture

Project Description Most existing shellfish aquaculture models were developed for implementation at the production or farm scale, neglecting all trophic levels equal to or higher than bivalves. This approach is useful on a farm scale, but shortsighted for ecosystem management, where several user groups may depend on the stability and sustainability of the entire system. […]

Hydrodynamic Impacts of Expanding Aquaculture

Project Description The projected increase in the demand for aquacultured seafood presents an economic opportunity to expand aquaculture production in Maine. Many studies show that aquaculture farms reduce tidal current magnitude at the surface and bottom, which impacts nutrient and waste transport. Without considering the impact of a farm on flow, and hence nutrient supply […]

Understanding Aquacultured Bivalve Growth and Climate Change Impacts in the Damariscotta River using a Coupled Modeling Approach

Project Description The Damariscotta River has been a successful oyster aquaculture area since the mid-1980s with other bivalve aquaculture beginning in the river in more recent years. Due to its unique bathymetry, the Damariscotta River forms three basins with dramatically different conditions; water temperature differences can be as much as 10 °C between the upper […]

Impact of Environmental Change on Material Transport

Project Description Estuarine circulation is the mechanism governing long-term material transport in estuaries, such as plankton, suspended sediment, and pollutants, and is important to understand for aquaculture sustainability in estuaries under environmental change. Many studies have shown the lateral variability of this transport can vary significantly across the estuary and during different forcing conditions. The […]

« Previous 1 2 3 Next »