Seafood is an excellent source of protein that is in booming demand worldwide and aquaculture is a key system capable of returning high yields of protein for human consumption and achieving food security. Australia's prawn farming sector produced over 5,000 tons of prawns valued at AUD 87.7 million between 2014 and 2015. Projections revealed that a 1% production improvement in aquaculture practices could generate a net profit of AUD 16 million annually.
Studies show that water conditions in prawn ponds are very dynamic. In a matter of hours, ponds transform from safe environments that do not pose any threat into dangerous spaces that threaten the life of this shellfish. Current methods of measuring water quality are still very labor-intensive and slow, which stands in the way of extracting important trends from the data. The next generation of data integration and supportive decision-making tools are based on augmented reality, inspired by the world of gaming.
We cannot discuss Australia's aquaculture health without mentioning the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), a major actor in this field. CSIRO developed technologies that provide aquaculture farmers with basic parameters to measure water quality in real-time, such as dissolved oxygen and pH levels. A prominent initiative launched in 2019 was the Digiscape Future Science Platform, CSIRO's incubator program, which aims at developing sensor technologies, creating data models, increasing spatial awareness, and supporting decision-making to help the prawn sector increase its yield consistently at a much larger scale.
Digiscape has begun developing augmented reality equipment based on the data provided by the Australian platform, Senaps, which helps companies collect data in different ways, use advanced analytics, and develop knowledge in important areas. CSIRO has selected prawn farming as the first agricultural field to test augmented reality technology. The project aims at helping Australian prawn farmers improve efficiency, increase production, and minimize risks through real-time sensing and forecasting of the conditions of animals and their ponds.
CSIRO has applied a set of elements that largely contributed to the platform's success, including the use of augmented reality inspired by the world of gaming to better visualize system conditions and models and access the virtual world through wearable and hands-free advanced technologies that farmers use while walking around and supervising the ponds. 24-hour forecasting of the basic water quality variables was made possible thanks to the data collected by the sensors installed in the ponds. Moreover, a combination of e-gaming platforms, state-of-the-art water quality sensing technologies, next-generation data interaction, and smart analysis was employed.
These data and projections have provided prawn farmers with valuable information that paves the way for better input management and real-time image sharing with office managers or external experts to receive fast input. This model is still under testing and training. Pacific Reef Fisheries, a prawn farming company in Ayr, north Queensland, is cooperating with CSIRO to provide real-life conditions for system testing. The development of aquaculture is part of CSIRO's digital revolution initiative in the agriculture sector through the Digiscape Future Science Platform. Other goals include increasing crop production, using carbon farming methods, water footprint monitoring, protecting the Great Barrier Reef, and managing animals by conducting tests inside the farms.
