Improving nutrient and water use efficiencies in multi-loop aquaponics systems
- PDF / 733,946 Bytes
- 10 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 97 Downloads / 199 Views
Improving nutrient and water use efficiencies in multi-loop aquaponics systems Simon Goddek 1
& Karel J. Keesman
1
Received: 26 March 2020 / Accepted: 27 August 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
The sustainable development of agricultural systems where nutrients and water are recycled to a high degree is of enormous importance. Traditional aquaponics, where fish and plants are cultivated in one recirculating system, addresses these ecological challenges, but still struggles with its economical feasibility. Decoupled multi-loop aquaponics systems, in which the aquaculture and hydroponics subsystems are running autonomously, proved that they can keep up with the productivity of state-of-the-art hydroponics systems or even outscore them. Yet, a problem of such decoupled aquaponics systems was that plants require a high nutrient concentration, whereas fish prefer rather a clean water. In practice, the opposite is happening as the nutrients are added to the aquaculture units through the feed. This paper optimizes a recent approach showing that desalination technologies, such as reverse osmosis, can play an important role in reversing the concentrations within such systems without killing beneficial plant growth–promoting rhizobacteria thermally. The proposed integrated systems approach has the potential to make both periodical nutrient and water discharges and excessive fertilizer supplementation obsolete that would otherwise be necessary to maintain good water quality for the fish and an optimal nutrient solution for the plants. Keywords Aquaponics . Desalination . Nutrient recovery . Decoupled aquaponics . Horticulture . Sustainability . Sustainable agriculture
This article is part of the Topical Collection on Aquaponics and Biofloc
* Simon Goddek [email protected] Karel J. Keesman [email protected]
1
Mathematical and Statistical Methods (Biometris), Wageningen University, P.O. Box 16, 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands
Aquaculture International
Introduction Aquaponics is the process of growing aquatic organisms and plants symbiotically in one system or several subsystems (Lennard and Leonard 2006; Monsees et al. 2017b; Yep and Zheng 2019), whereas the process water is recirculated freely between the aquaculture and hydroponics units in one-loop systems (Palm et al. 2019); decoupled multi-loop aquaponics systems follow a different approach. Decoupled aquaponics systems separate the aquaculture and hydroponics units from each other so that optimal conditions (i.e., temperature, pH, nutrient concentration, etc.) for both fish and plant can be achieved (Goddek et al. 2016; Kledal and Thorarinsdottir 2018; Kloas et al. 2015). Advantages of decoupled aquaponics systems is a higher water and nutrient use efficiency and presumably higher yields compared with the traditional approach and stand-alone hydroponics systems (Delaide et al. 2016; Dijkgraaf et al. 2019; Goddek and Vermeulen 2018; Nicoletto et al. 2018; Nozzi et al. 2018; Saha et al. 2016). However, this tendentious effect was mainly being observe
Data Loading...
