ASTRAL monitoring programme and recommendations for dedicated monitoring at IMTA labs D5.5

This document was created as part of the H2020 All Atlantic Ocean Sustainable, Profitable and Resilient Aquaculture (ASTRAL) project, in support of Work Package 5 Climate – Ocean – Food. The ASTRAL project facilitated the development of new and improved innovative technology to support integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA) production monitoring and management. It also investigated past and future environmental and climatic risks to aquaculture in the northern and southern Atlantic regions. This report draws from the findings of several public project reports to provide recommendations on best design, list of relevant parameters and most appropriate sensors and observing platforms for IMTA-system-specific monitoring programmes for climate change, Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs), pathogens, and microplastics. It should be noted that there is a distinction to be made between the monitoring of the production environment, and the monitoring of the ambient or incoming water environment; this document focusses on the latter.
The report is structured as follows: Chapter 2 introduces the concept of IMTA featuring the different IMTA systems types that were employed in the ASTRAL project; Chapter 3 discusses the climate related risk to IMTA and aquaculture; Chapter 4 focusses on the HAB related risks to IMTA and aquaculture; while Chapter 5 discusses pathogen related risks to IMTA and aquaculture; Chapter 6 considers microplastic in aquaculture; and lastly Chapter 7 discusses technology recommendations. Each of the sections are broken down, where applicable, into regional-related, system-related, and monitoring-related considerations; each section concludes with the specific monitoring recommendations related to the chapter topic. Summary tables of the system-specific monitoring recommendations for climate change, HABs and pathogens are provided in Chapter 8.