IMPAQT – AN INTELLEGIENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR INTEGRATED MULTI-TROPHIC AQUACULTURE- A CASE STUDY: CAMLI PILOT SITE

The IMPAQT project is an ambitious challenge to design and demonstrate an IMTA system supported by and Intelligent Management System (IMS). The project’s demonstration has been planned to be carried out at six different pilot sites around Europe and one in China, all which has their production and product properties comprising different trophic species such as seaweeds, mussels, scallops, lobster and fish. The pilot in Camli (Cesme, Turkey) has been installed within the boundaries of the offshore production sites of a commercial enterprise at industrial scale which mainly produces seabream, seabass and meagre. The pilot has been designed to carry out an integrated aquaculture production for seabass, blue mussel and sea lettuce. The development of such an offshore IMTA system requires the identification and analysis of environmental, economic and operational costs and benefits in order to be able to compare to a traditional monoculturing offshore system with a similar scale . The comparative results of such investigations will enable to assess the actual feasibility for an IMTA system for the future development of offshore aquaculture.

The pilot has been designed as a trio-trophic system comprising macroalgae lines, mussel rafts, and fish cages at unit commercial production unit. Three bouys equipped with a set of sensors around the system enabling continuous measurement of a set of envrionmental variables such as temperature, salinity, DO, Chl a, turbidity, etc.) provides observational data via wireles connection tools developed . There are also surface and under water cameras and wheather station providing data via same connection tools. All data are transfered first to a dedicated server and then to the cloud account as a data storage and retrieval platform. The data on the farming operations such as feeding, mortality, grading, stoking density, disease treatment, etc. are been entered by user so that; • monitoring growth and feed consumption for the optimization of stocking, feeding and harvesting, • monitoring and preventing health related problems • monitoring environmental footprint, and. • monitoring welfare of cultured organisms. can be performed more efficiently by using the integrated systems and thus, the ability to control the state of production and to predict iteratively harvestable products over a calender schedule can be more realible and feasible.