Introduction
Within the globally growing aquaculture industry recirculating systems are getting more important. While these land-based systems have high-tech infrastructures, their potential for on-farm data management and analysis is far from being fully utilized. This hinders their operation on environmentally and economically optimal levels and lowers operational security and with it fish welfare.
Urban Blue offers land-based aquaculture farms a software solution which enables them to monitor key farm aspects and manage, analyse, and visualize this data to enable a better
system operation. The Urban Blue system is a combination of a computer-based platform,
hardware sensors and a mobile phone app allowing to assess the system (pumps, tanks, valves) and manage the operational workflow (task, routines, lists).
Together with the Zurich University of Applied Science Urban Blue has launched the Innosuissse innovation project AWACS (Animal Welfare Assessment and Control System for fish farms). The project aims at developing the automated assessment of fish-based parameters and adding them to the Urban Blue system in order to provide the aquaculture industry with a truly comprehensive solution, which allows fish-farms to constantly monitor, automatically assess and visually analyse fish health and welfare.
Safeguarding fish welfare by thinking worker-centred
Currently operational personnel on fish farms often reacts to imminent situations threatening the system’s operation and the fish’s welfare. Expanding data collection augments surveillance and available information about the system and fish. Improving data management enables personnel by moving from an experience-based to a knowledge-based farm operation. And enhancing data analysis facilitates early detection of problematic situations allowing workers to move away from reacting and towards acting. The key is to translate the farm’s data into actionable insights and present them to the farm team in a useful way. To do this the AWACS team developed an innovative notification software based on flagged situations. This Urban Blue software assists data collection, management and analysis and with it empowers farm teams, secures system operation and safeguards fish health and welfare (Fig. 1).
Securing fish welfare by automating assessments
Facilitating its assessment on-farm is the key to improving fish welfare in aquaculture, yet appropriate methods for industrial settings are still lacking (Manfrin et al. 2018). The AWACS project develops an applicable fish welfare assessment in three steps. First, the existing fish welfare indexing model MyFishCheck (Tschirren et al. 2021) is incorporated into the Urban Blue software. This allows fish farms to make standardised welfare assessments a part of their routines. Second, the evaluation of those MyFishCheck parameters that are based on the physiological health are automated using artificial intelligence. For this object recognition and image processing are used to detect different symptoms of impaired fish health and the information is fed back into the Urban Blue software. Third, the behavioural parameters of the MyFishCheck model are automated based on video analysis. For this computer vision algorithms are used to monitor group behaviour and the information is again used for a comprehensive welfare assessment within the software. Overall, AWACS will augment fish health and welfare surveillance using machine-driven solutions and allow practicable advances using a worker-centred approach.
Conclusion
Aquaculture can benefit greatly from the development of modern technologies such as data science and artificial intelligence. However, these methods will only be applicable in the industry if the focus is on the interface between farm workers and computer software.
References
Manfrin, A., Messori, S. & Arcangeli, G. (2018) Strengthening fish welfare research through a gap analysis study. European Animal Health & Welfare Research.
Tschirren, L., Bachmann, D., Güler, A. C., Blaser, O., Rhyner, N., Seitz, A., Zbinden, E., Wahli, T., Segner, H. & Refardt, D. (2021) MyFishCheck: A model to assess fish welfare in aquaculture. Animals 11: 145.