ShellEye: Satellite-based water quality bulletins for shellfish farms to support management decisions

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This project will use ocean-viewing satellites together with weather forecasts in order to help monitor the quality of water surrounding shellfish farms. These tools will help the shellfish farmers make decisions, for example when to harvest their crop to avoid contamination in nearby water.The farming or cultivation of seafood (e.g. shellfish) termed 'aquaculture' is an important worldwide source of protein. As global populations continue to rise the need for aquaculture as an important source of food will only increase. So increasing aquaculture output will help to provide food security for future generations. So approaches to help ensure efficient and sustainable aquaculture farming (e.g. towards reducing farm costs and energy use, and ensuring supply) will clearly help the industry to expand to feed future populations. Pollution events that reduce the quality of the water within an aquaculture farm, both from humans and naturally occurring, can significantly impact aquaculture farms. These events can cause the loss of stock (ie shellfish have to be disposed of), harvesting to stop (causing a loss in supply to the customer), illness or in extreme cases death (through humans eating contaminated food).Water quality in and around the aquaculture farms in the UK and Europe are monitored using a series of tests based on collecting water samples and analyzing the flesh of the seafood being farmed. This sampling is carried out by government agencies. Due to financial constraints and complexity of this sampling, it is not possible to take samples everyday and there is a delay between the samples being collected and the results being given to the farmer. The farmers themselves often do not have any way of measuring the water quality within their own farms, so they have to rely on the monitoring provided by the agencies, even if it is sporadic and the results are delayed. Whereas up to date information on water quality would help farmers make decisions about when and how much to harvest. Information about the quality of the water offshore from their farm would help warn farmers of possible future water quality problems within their farm.There are many approaches that have been developed by scientists to use satellites to provide salmon and trout farmers with information on their local water quality. Scientists have also looked at the links between reduced water quality and changes in the weather conditions. For instance satellites are routinely used for monitoring water quality in and around Salmon farms in Scotland, and simple models that relate environmental conditions like rainfall and sunlight to reduced water quality have been developed for the south west UK. These approaches and tools have yet to be made available to shellfish farms in a way that is simple for farmers to use and exploit. This project will extend the approaches developed for Salmon farmers to be specific for shellfish farmers. It will develop and extend existing methods for using satellites for studying water quality in offshore and coastal farms. It will also extend and develop simple tools that shellfish farmers can use to predict short-term variations in water quality, based on their local weather conditions and forecasts. A simple method to provide this information in a timely manner through regular 'news bulletins' to farmers using text messages and emails will also be tested. Importantly, all of this work will be carried out in conjunction with shellfish farmers, allowing them to provide feedback on the project and ensure that the results are highly relevant to their needs.