Aquaculture in the Ecosystem

The global expansion of aquaculture production and its future role as a food supplier to human society has environmental, social and economic limitations, affecting marine ecosystems and socio-economic scales from local to global. The expansion is closely linked with human health requirements and societal needs for various goods and services provided by marine ecosystems. This book provides a scientific forecast of the development in aquaculture with a focus on the environmental, technological, social and economic constraints that need to be resolved to ensure sustainable development of the industry and allow the industry to be able to feed healthy seafood products to the future generations. The chapters included discuss the most critical bottlenecks of the development encompassing subjects of understanding the environmental impacts, the current state-of-art in monitoring programs and in coastal zone management, the important interactions between wild and cultured organisms including release of non-native species into the wild, the current trends within the development of aquafeeds along with human health aspects as well as the political, socio-economic and economic trends within the industry including a chapter on approaches taken by Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) to aquaculture. Finally the last chapter provides different future scenarios of the industry based on the identified bottlenecks.

The contributions to this book were supported by the EC-funded SAMI project.