Global food production requires innovative solutions to address challenges arising from population growth, climate change, and increasing competition for natural resources. To address the impacts of these trends – across one pillar of food production – the agriculture industry has adopted precision farming concepts that rely on technologies including drones, autonomous tractors, and IoT connectivity to improve farm management, efficiency, and sustainability.

A sister industry, equally important to global food security but less served by technological advances, is aquaculture. Farmed fish production has grown rapidly, from supplying just seven percent of fish for human consumption in 1974 to more than half in 2016. This rapid expansion has led to challenges including concerns over environmental degradation, disease and parasite outbreaks, and the need to efficiently manage resources to maximize productivity. Effective management requires additional insight to make decisions in a chaotic environment subject to the vagaries of oceans and weather.

Cognizant of these challenges and the potential of technology to revolutionize the industry, GAIN is developing a data-driven management platform for aquaculture. Our work integrates data from a variety of sources including environmental sensors, underwater video monitoring, hydroacoustic technology, and drone imagery, together with satellite and other geospatial datasets, into a unified cloud platform, encapsulating the full dynamics of the farm environment in real-time.

The data is processed by AI technology enabling extraction of pertinent features, identification of correlation across disparate data sources,  and implementation of predictive analytics to provide early warning on pertinent risks. Our goal is to transition the aquaculture industry from ad hoc decision making based on heuristics and intuition to real-time informed decisions backed by AI insights and IoT connectivity. This transition has the potential to greatly reduce operational costs while enhancing fish health and ensuring sustainability for the aquaculture industry.