Optimizing cost-effective and benchmarked industry standards to quantify nutrient bioextraction by seaweed

Technical Report · Mon Feb 10 04:00:00 EST 2025

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/2558091· OSTI ID:2558091

Price, Nichole ^[1]; Archer, Stephen ^[1]; Rogers, Shane ^[1]

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1. Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, East Boothbay, ME (United States)

Interest in the utility of seaweed farms to mitigate coastal eutrophication, or nutrient loading, has grown commensurate with the recent rise of the farmed seaweed industry in the U.S. But economic valuation of this ecosystem service remains elusive in part because of challenges in quantifying this spatiotemporally variable biological process with reproducible and comparable metrics. Regulatory bodies that permit wastewater discharge or lease area for aquaculture farms require water quality testing and reporting of dissolved total nitrogen (N) in nearshore marine environments. These metrics must meet EPA standards for testing and reporting (e.g., Total Kjeldahl Nitrogen - TKN). However, these metrics are inherently highly variable over space and time in dynamic nearshore systems, and expensive to evaluate with sufficient breadth to constrain this variance, creating a critical bottleneck to direct quantification of farmed seaweed net uptake rates in situ.

• Research Organization: Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, East Boothbay, ME (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E)
• DOE Contract Number: AR0001169
• OSTI ID: 2558091
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES