Poster presentation during a relationship event, where the IAG Algae project was taken as an example for interleaving education and research.
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Diadema sea-urchins play a vital role in maintaining a balanced coral reef ecosystem by grazing away algae and creating bare substrate for coral recruitment. The RAAKPRO Diadema project aims to develop interventions to improve larval recruitment and juvenile survival to increase local Diadema populations. To do this, researchers are investigating the larval and settlement stage of Diadema populations around the islands of Saba and St. Eustatius. First results show that some locations have a high suitability for “assisted natural recovery”.
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Op de HAS Hogeschool wordt al een aantal jaren voer voor vis en schaaldieren op basis van insecten vergeleken met regulier voer op basis van vismeel en/of visolie. Dit onderzoek wordt uitgevoerd in samenwerking met New Generation Nutrition. Resultaten laten zien dat garnalen gevoerd met voer op basis van insecten even goed groeien als bij regulier voer. Tot op heden is onbekend of het voer op basis van insecten gezondheidsrisico’s met zich meebrengt en dergelijk onderzoek komt na het aanstellen van Olga Haenen als lector Gezonde en Duurzame eiwitten in een stroomversnelling.
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Large floating projects have the potential to overcome the challenge of land scarcity in urban areas and offer opportunities for energy and food production, or even for creating sustainable living environments. However, they influence the physical, chemical, biological and ecological characteristics of water bodies. The interaction of the floating platforms affect multiple complex aquatic processes, and the potential (negative/positive) effects are not yet fully understood. Managing entities currently struggle with lack of data and knowledge that can support adequate legislation to regulate future projects.In the Netherlands the development of small scale floating projects is already present for some years (e.g. floating houses, restaurants, houseboats), and more recently several large scale floating photovoltaic plants (FPV) have been realized. Several floating constructions in the Netherlands were considered as case-studies for a data-collection campaign.To obtain data and images from underneath floating buildings, underwater drones were equipped with cameras and sensors. The drones were used in multiple locations to scan for differences in concentrations of basic water quality parameters (e.g. dissolved oxygen, electrical conductivity, algae, light intensity) from underneath/near the floating structures, which were then compared with data from locations far from the influence of the buildings. Continuous data was also collected over several days using multi-parameter water quality sensors permanently installed under floating structures.
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Digital Twins of the Ocean (DTO) are a rapidly emerging topic that has attracted significant interest from scientists in recent years. The initiative, strongly driven by the EU, aims to create a digital replica of the ocean to better understand and manage marine environments. The Iliad project, funded under the EU Green Deal call, is developing a framework to support multiple interoperable DTO using a federated systems-of-systems approach across various fields of applications and ocean areas, called pilots. This paper presents the results of a Water Quality DTO pilot located in the Trondheim fjord in Norway. This paper details the building blocks of DTO, specific to this environmental monitoring pilot. A crucial aspect of any DTO is data, which can be sourced internally, externally, or through a hybrid approach utilizing both. To realistically twin ocean processes, the Water Quality pilot acquires data from both surface and benthic observatories, as well as from mobile sensor platforms for on-demand data collection. Data ingested into an InfluxDB are made available to users via an API or an interface for interacting with the DTO and setting up alerts or events to support ’what-if’ scenarios. Grafana, an interactive visualization application, is used to visualize and interact with not only time-series data but also more complex data such as video streams, maps, and embedded applications. An additional visualization approach leverages game technology based on Unity and Cesium, utilizing their advanced rendering capabilities and physical computations to integrate and dynamically render real-time data from the pilot and diverse sources. This paper includes two case studies that illustrate the use of particle sensors to detect microplastics and monitor algae blooms in the fjord. Numerical models for particle fate and transport, OpenDrift and DREAM, are used to forecast the evolution of these events, simulating the distribution of observed plankton and microplastics during the forecasting period.
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Bitumen is a highly valued and much used roofing material, but as an oilbased, non-renewable product, bitumen is now no longer sustainable. In response to this growing need to produce more sustainable construction materials, Icopal bv, Algaecom and the Hanze University of Applied Sciences collaborated on the study to replace part of the fossil oil by Algal oils.
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On October 22st, 2021, the first ever recorded Diadema sea urchins in the Caribbean were cultured on Saba. Diadema sea urchins are important grazers and can facilitate corals by reducing their competition with algae. By culturing them, researchers from University of Applied Sciences Van Hall Larenstein set an important step in restocking sea urchins on Saba’s coral reefs.
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Ecosystem engineering research has recently demonstrated the fundamental importance of non-trophic interactions for food-web structure. Particularly, by creating benign conditions in stressful environments, ecosystem engineers create hot beds of elevated levels of recruitment, growth, and survival of associated organisms; this should fuel food webs and promote production on the ecosystem scale. However, there is still limited empirical evidence of the influence of non-trophic interactions on the classical food-web processes that determine energy transfer, that is, consumer–resource interactions. On the basis of a biomanipulation experiment covering 600 m2 of an intertidal flat, we show that ecosystem engineers influence resource uptake efficiency and the accumulation of algae following nutrient enrichment in a soft-sediment food web. Nutrient additions increased chlorophyll a concentrations in the sediment by 90%, but only in plots where we also introduced high densities (2000 per m2) of a burrowing bivalve, the common cockle Cerastoderma edule. The artificial cockle beds increased the nutrient uptake efficiency of the biofilm and promoted sediment accumulation, which suggests that the cockles facilitated the sediment-living algae by increasing sediment stability. This indicates that ecological interactions, rather than the availability of nutrients per se, set the limits for production in this coastal ecosystem. Our results emphasize the need to include facilitation theory and recognize that positive interactions between species are key to understand, manage, and restore ecosystems under human influence.
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