UK Aquaculture Initiative Network. Aquaculture Research Collaborative Hub -UK (ARCH-UK)

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The UK aquaculture sector contributes around £600 million to a UK seafood industry worth at £6.3 billion in 2016. The UK seafood market is complex and includes large added value through wild fish imports, and both wild and farmed seafood exports. Within the UK the aquaculture sector in England, Wales and N. Ireland collectively produce 19,000 metric tons (mt) of shellfish and 9,200 mt of trout, with production coming mainly from SMEs. Scotland is a major producer of Atlantic salmon (>163,000 mt; third largest producer globally) and the industry is both highly consolidated and export focused. In Scotland there is also significant trout (6,000 mt) and shellfish (6,300 mt) production. There is also a significant and expanding aquaculture industry in England, Wales and Ireland, most notably for shellfish with the largest single UK shellfish farm in Southwest England.In order for the UK to remain competitive within this rapidly growing sector it is essential that the expansion of the industry is supported by high quality, innovative research to better understand the basic biology, health and environmental interactions of farmed fish and shellfish and to ensure a sustainable future. In this application it is proposed that a single aquaculture network called the Aquaculture Research Collaborative Hub-UK (ARCH-UK) will be established operating through two groups, the Finfish Aquaculture Group and the Shellfish Aquaculture Group to support the development of scientific knowledge and technological capability to help to provide solutions to the shared and specific issues preventing growth in all sectors in the UK aquaculture industry.ARCH will develop a community of academic based researchers and related businesses to foster collaborative activities to help identify and develop new approaches to tackle major research and innovation challenges and to help deliver key benefits to the UK aquaculture sector. The network will draw in researchers from the main disciplines of biological and environmental sciences and will actively engage with researchers from engineering, economics, social science, remote sensing and computational modelling.