Aquaponics: The Basics

Abstract

Aquaponics is a technology that is part of the broader integrated agriaquaculture systems discipline which seeks to combine animal and plant culture technologies to confer advantages and conserve nutrients and other biological and economic resources. It emerged in the USA in the early 1970s and has recently seen a resurgence, especially in Europe. Whilst aquaponics broadly combines recirculating fish culture with hydroponic plant production, the application of the term aquaponic is broad and many technologies claim use of the name. Combining fish culture with aquatic-based, terrestrial plant culture via aquaponics may be better defined via its nutrient resource sharing credentials. Aquaponics applies several principles including, but not limited to, efficient water use, efficient nutrient use, lowered or negated environmental impact and the application of biological and ecological approaches to agricultural fish and plant production. Water sources are important so that the nutrients required for fish and plant production are available and balanced, and system water chemistry is paramount to optimised fish and plant production. Systems may be configured in several ways, including those that are fully recirculating and those that are decoupled. Aquaponics importantly seeks to apply methods that provide technical, biological, chemical, environmental and economic advantages.

Biocontrol of Phytopathogens under Aquaponics Systems

“…Since modern aquaponics started in 1970s, they have been focused on sustainable practices by sharing water and nutrient resources between fish and plants subsystems [2,45,46]. Aquaponics is a complex system which combine aquaculture (raising fish in tanks) and hydroponics (growing plants in soilless media) subsystems [2]. Simplifying the aquaponics system, it is composed of a fish tank connected to a hydroponics unit connected back to fish tank creating a recirculating system [7].…”

“…The fish metabolize their feeding, then the faeces and waste are transformed by microbial communities which make available the nutrients for plants, simultaneously cleaning the water and recycling nutrients [31]. Aquaponics demand more technical knowledge than hydroponics and aquaculture to maintain a balance between all the elements of the system and, specifically, to prevent plant pathogen diseases [2], and for that reason the whole system is described briefly in this review.…”

“…Aquaponics is based on recirculation of water through the entire system which makes perfect conditions for pathogen dissemination [6]. Water is an important element on the entire aquaponics system, because it circulates in all the subsystems, transport the nutrients and influence the growing environment of fish, plant or microorganisms [2]. Water sources may contain microbial pathogens affecting fish, plants and even human health, i.e., rainwater used not to contain microbes but the way it is stored may allow microbial proliferation, and ground and river water could contain microbial pathogens depending on its source area like animal farming and human waste treatment [31].…”

“…To supply global food demand, production will need to increase by 50% [1]. Unfortunately, this demand will be affected by factors such as climate change, pollution, and the available resources i.e., arable land, available water and mineral nutrients which are finite [2,3]. Trying to prevent these scenarios, the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) presented "The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development", concluding that there is a need to change from intensive food production systems towards sustainable ones [4].…”

“…It is a healthy and environmental option for food production which has encouraged research into many different aspects [6]. Aquaponics has been compared with aquaculture [2,7,8] and hydroponic [9][10][11][12] technologies in terms of production and profitability. Up to now, the research on aquaponics has been focused on sustainability [13][14][15], economic optimization [16][17][18], functional setup [19,20], stocking density [21,22], cultivation media [23,24], water recirculation [25,26], food safety [9,27], fish-plant pathogens [6,28] and beneficial microorganisms [29,30].…”