Pond aquaculture processes are highly interactive with the surrounding environment, particularly the adjacent reed and marsh vegetation. The design and planning of sustainable pond aquaculture requires a thorough understanding of the biophysical processes behind these interactions within the system and with the surrounding environment. However, it remains a challenge to study the internal interactions between the various interconnected subsystems of the pond ecosystem and also to consider the external environmental interactions on a quantitative basis. Therefore, our work aims to create a unified simulation model of a managed fishpond/reed ecosystem to understand the dynamic balances and casual causal relationships behind environmental interactions.
The methodology involved establishing the links between the sub-models of the pond compartment and reed on land and in the pond. Starting from this structure, the model describes the flows of nutrients between the elements, determined by various processes and functions . For modelling and simulation, the Programmable Process Structures framework has been used to enable the unified creation and execution of the underlying multidisciplinary dynamic models (Varga & Csukás, 2022). A previously developed and validated pond model by Sharma et al. (2024) has been used to describe the processes in the pond. I n addition to the literature-based description of the various elementary processes for reed plants, we consciously follow the consideration of the associated stoichiometric atomic balance of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus. The analysis of atomic balances allows for an explicit evaluation of the underlying system on a conservational basis and also allows to check the completeness and correctness of the model under consideration.
Hypothetical scenarios (with different stocking densities, feeding regimes, reed cover, and reed management practices) are tested to obtain preliminary results for different environmental interactions and features such as carbon sequestration, quality of effluent, and biowaste, the quantity of the sediment in the pond, etc.
Acknowledgments
This research has been performed in the scope of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research project EATFISH (grant no. 956697).
References
Sharma, P., Gyalog, G., Berzi-Nagy, L., Tóth, F., Nagy, Z., Halasi-Kovács, B., ... & Varga, M. (2024). Reusability check-based refinement of a biophysical fishpond model. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 218, 108664. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2024.108664
Varga, M., Csukás, B. (2022). Foundations of Programmable Process Structures for the unified modeling and simulation of agricultural and aquacultural systems. Information Processes in Agriculture, in the press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inpa.2022.10.001