The use of intensive aquaculture techniques in the United States has placed an increasing emphasis on maintaining water quality. Development of a low-cost and reliable automated water quality and feed condition monitoring and control system would provide both research and commercial aquaculturists with a means of maintaining water quality for hatchery, nursery, grow-out and feed production systems. Information gathered from both research and commercial aquaculturists and instrument manufacturers has indicated that four elements are required to design an appropriate monitoring/control system: an understanding of the biological, physical and chemical parameters critical to aquaculture; experience in instrumentation (and calibration); microcomputer programming capability; and experience with control devices and electronic theory. To date there have been no coordinated efforts to integrate these four elements to produce a complete system of monitoring and control for aquaculture. Utilization of off- the-shelf environmental sensors, microcomputers and control devices integrated by software modules would go far in alleviating the problems attendant to maintaining water quality in intensive aquaculture systems.
