Aquaculture is receiving considerable interest because of the increased consumer demand for fish and shellfish and a decline in the catches seen in the world’s fisheries. That’s why the aquaculture sector is steadily expanding to exploit the resulting market potential: nowadays, aquaculture is one of the fastest food producing sectors providing over 50% of the world’s fish consumption.
“In recent years our customers coming from the aquaculture sector became more and more aware about the fact that in order for an aquaculture enterprise to remain viable and profitable, it must be environmentally sound and able to monitor its performance”, says Kostas Seferis, CEO of Integrated Information System SA(I2S), a Greek high tech company specialized in the area of aquaculture applications and developer of the aquaManager platform (www.aqua-manager.com).
“That’s why we decided to join the BlueBRIDGE project. By integrating some of the analysis and simulation algorithms of the aquaManager system into the BlueBRIDGE infrastructure, we can contribute in providing innovative targeted data services that can support aquaculture producers to answer their main concern: how can I maximize the growth rate of my livestock by minimizing the production costs?”
The BlueBRIDGE offer includes the delivery of innovative data services to support the collaborative production of scientific knowledge required for monitoring fisheries and habitat degradation for analysing socio-economic performance in aquaculture and services for the efficient identification of strategic locations of interest that meet multifactor selection criteria.
Aquafarming enterprises can benefit from BlueBRIDGE by joining the pool of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) already involved in the project to test and use the BlueBRIDGE aquaculture services.
On the other side ICT companies serving the aquaculture sector, have the opportunity to expand their customer portfolio or meet new customer requirements that today they cannot satisfy, by simply adopting the BlueBRIDGE services.
The added value of BlueBRIDGE relies in its consortium of partners and in its underlying technology.
The BlueBRIDGE consortium brings together scientists, practitioners and experts from different disciplines (e.g. fisheries, biology, economics, statistics, environment, etc), who are individually considered as world leaders in their respective areas (http://www.bluebridge-vres.eu/about/who-is-involved).
In addition seven of the fourteen partners are private companies specialising in aquaculture and fisheries management. This makes BlueBRIDGE a unique knowledge hub at the disposal of aquaculture enterprises.
The second key aspect is the technology: the knowledge production chain from the initial phases of data collection, through to aggregation, analysis and the production of indicators that is at the bases of the two above mentioned aquaculture services is made simple by the infrastructure underlying BlueBRIDGE, the so called D4Science infrastructure (https://www.d4science.org/).
D4Science can be considered a unique place where data, computing resources and services are merged together and are at disposal of communities that can build specific applications to solve their needs. To demonstrate some of the numbers, D4Science today counts over 2000 users, integrates more than 50 repositories, executes around 20,000 models & algorithms per month and provides access to over a billion records in repositories worldwide, with 99,7 per cent service availability.
Can you imagine how much this will cost if your own company were to build this from scratch?
BlueBRIDGE will run until February 2018 so, if you are interested in the BlueBRIDGE developments and you want to understand more please subscribe to the BlueBRIDGE monthly newsletter www.bluebridge-vres.eu or contact us at info@bluebridge-vres.eu. Science can make a difference in quality.
