This demonstrator is jointly developed by the Statistics and Information Branch of the Fisheries Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the French provider of environmental monitoring solutions Collecte Localisation Satellites (CLS).

It will expand the remote sensing analytic capabilities of the existing Aquaculture Atlas Production System (AAPS) Virtual Lab in order to provide a robust and replicable environment for monitoring aquaculture in marine cages and in coastal areas.

The ambition is to deliver a tool to produce national aquaculture sector overviews whereby a country can make use of OGC compliant data services to monitor its aquaculture sector, not in an isolated way, but built on interoperable services where teams can compute and publish reproducible experiments.

Existing Aquaculture Atlas Production System (AAPS) algorithms will be improved, and in the first phase focus will be on improving their performance. Once the detection of farms and aquaculture areas is improved, the second phase will see development of fully integrated services, where data and products from other demonstrators will contribute to more challenging scenarios to study the feasibility of exploring the dynamic relation between aquaculture and the environment, e.g. by aligning aquafarm time-series of feeding with ocean colour imagery to discover nutrient pollution, or to study the feasibility of exploring the dynamics of coastal land conversion to aquaculture ponds, or conversely, to study salt intrusion following storm surges or rising sea levels.

A monitor of aquaculture can become an important information source for local and national governments that lack capacity to implement a national monitoring tool. It can thus provide a monitor for several Sustainable Development Goals such as 14 "Life below water", and 2 "Food Security".

Discover the other Blue-Cloud demonstrators!

Fish, a matter of scales