In recent years aqua-farming companies have been competing in an extremely low profit margin environment, thus relying on high sales volume to create adequate profits. This landscape leaves little room for inefficient operations. Another major issue is the environmental impact and the environmental sustainability of the production.
Aquaculture, in common with many other sectors, uses natural resources and interacts with the environment on issues of environmental protection. Efficient production management and the development of best practices respond to the above needs. It can dramatically help companies, most of which are SMEs, to improve profitability and minimize environmental impacts. BlueBRIDGE will develop a service supporting investors and scientists in the efficient identification of strategic locations of interest that meet multifactor selection criteria.

The Strategic Investment Analysis and Scientific Planning and Alerting VRE in a nutshell

Blue Growth scenario:

Provide an on-line environment, for the probing of investment cases in aquaculture, and to scientists and policy makers for the detection of locations for scientific, environmental or socioeconomic attention.

Challenges:

The VRE addresses the challenge of probing on the globe, and more particularly in the sea, locations that meet a number of criteria, which, under a specific perspective are candidates for great opportunities or dangers. This probing is applied under a continuously varying substrate of data that originate from a variety of domains, such as earth observation, climate forecasts, environmental phenomena forecasts, socio-economic statistics, investment performance modeling etc.

The underlying challenges are multifold:
– Delivery of models that are optimal for the perspective under which the globe is analyzed
– Identification of relevant data for the respective models.
– Adaptation and harmonization of the data for fitting the models’ needs, overcoming issues with completeness, scale, acquisition methodology etc.
– Delivery of efficient computational mechanisms for the continuous probing of the big data sets that underlie a search over the globe or smaller areas of it.

Finally a challenge that is cornerstone for the applicability of the VRE tools in various domain, is that all previously mentioned challenges cannot take the shortcut of focusing on a particular domain. A system agnostic of the datasets and the models needs to be delivered so as to be able to capture the future needs of its initial users, be it investors, scientists, policy-makers or students, and also be able to extend to new areas of opportunity.

Scope/Thematic area:

Aquatic Environments Policy Making / Enforcement
Aquaculture Investment Planning

Short Description (high level):

A computationally powerful system for the detection of geographical locations of interest under multifactor evaluation criteria.
Functionalities:

  • Data collection

  • Data delivery (WCS, WMS)

  • Data harmonization

  • Data visualization (geo)

  • Multi-factor optimization

Direct beneficiaries:

  • Investors in aquaculture

  • Scientists; scientific advisory panels

  • Policy makers in socioeconomic and environmental protection fields

  • Students
Expected Outcomes:

  • Collaborative environment for geo data harmonization and analysis

  • Domain models for the various selected cases (investment and environment)

  • Alerting tool for scientists

  • Datasets and maps (geo-visualization)

  • OGC compliant products

Existing or similar solutions:

No similar generic solutions exist due to the complexity of the problem. The common workaround is map coloring over static models and datasets provided by scientists.

Where to access:

https://i-marine.d4science.org/web/strategicinvestmentanalysis

Click here to find out more about the VREs that have been released so far