Water Quality and Aquaculture

AIMS' research effort is aimed at supporting sustainable marine aquaculture by identifying new products, closing life cycles to achieve full domestication and developing technologies to enhance production and minimise environmental impacts.

Past research at AIMS has focused on prawn aquaculture, an industry that has grown steadily over the past 20 years in Australia and where the impacts of water quality are important both inside and outside the farm. This work went beyond the simple measurement of nutrient concentrations in waste water and incorporated process measurements such as primary production rates and phytoplankton responses to nutrients to provide more integrated and robust measures of impacts.

Current research at AIMS is focused on sea cage aquaculture in tropical environments. Although much is known about the effects and sustainable management of this kind of aquaculture in temperate environments, a different monitoring and management approach needs to be found in tropical environments where there are differences in climate, culture species, oceanographic regimes, nutrient process rates, and diversity of flora and fauna.

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Related links:
Inside Prawn Ponds brochure
Australian Prawn Farmers Association

October 30, 2007