Ramón Filgueira

Verified

Ramón verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

Ramón verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• Professor (Associate) at Dalhousie University

In aquatic environments, low dissolved oxygen concentrations can result in depressed bivalve defense systems while promoting anaerobic bacterial growth, ultimately leading to increased bivalve mortality rates. Although the relation- ship between low oxygen availability and bivalve mortality has been previously examined, the mechanisms of mortality...

Cucumaria frondosa is one of the largest and most abundant species of sea cucumber in the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans. C. frondosa are commercially exploited in Maine and Atlantic Canada, and sustainable stock management requires addressing knowledge gaps in their ecophysiology and bioenergetics. While temperature is commonly assumed to be the...

The expansion of low-trophic aquaculture (shellfish and sea plants) is limited in many regions by a fragmented regulatory process that is difficult for smallholder farmers to navigate. Small-scale Aquaculture Development Areas (ADAs) can remove some of this regulatory burden by establishing pre-approved zones for aquaculture development; however, a...

Aquaculture farms represent a complex 3D environment and face regular seasonal challenges such as acute and chronically elevated temperatures during summer. Further, fish are exposed to the interaction between their environment and farm operations, which can cause challenging conditions. In the context of modern net-pen aquaculture and ocean warmin...

Aquaculture technology is on the move, enabling production in more open and exposed ocean environments around the world. These new systems offer solutions to environmental challenges facing conventional aquaculture, yet new technologies also create new social challenges while potentially exacerbating, or at minimum recreating, others. Offshore aqua...

Climate change is leading to worldwide ocean temperature rise and increased occurrence of low oxygen events. Dissolved oxygen and water temperature play a crucial role in the growth and health of fish becoming determining factors of welfare. In order to counteract the effects of low oxygen events, farms worldwide have begun to experiment with oxyge...

Cucumaria frondosa is the largest and most abundant species of sea cucumber in the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans. C. frondosa are commercially exploited in Maine and Atlantic Canada, and sustainable stock management requires addressing knowledge gaps in their ecophysiology and bioenergetics. While temperature is commonly assumed to be the princi...

Introduction: Hypoxia is defined as a critically low-oxygen condition of water, which, if prolonged, can be harmful to fish and many other aquatic species. In the context of ocean salmon fish farming, early detection of hypoxia events is critical for farm managers to mitigate these events to reduce fish stress, however in complex natural systems ac...

Within the framework of Ecosystem Approach to Aquaculture (EAA), ecological carrying capacity (ECC) is a key concept that helps to determine the upper limit of production without compromising ecosystem functioning. The implementation of ECC is complex as ECC differs between type of farms and location and standardised methods should be developed for...

Aquaculture eco-certification is associated with some producer-level benefits including price premiums and market access; however, reputational benefits from eco-certification are unclear. A public survey was used to understand the effect of eco-certification on opinion of salmon farming in two Canadian provinces (British Columbia and Nova Scotia)...

Climate change is disproportionately affecting Arctic ecosystems and their resident species, but knowledge gaps complicate conservation planning. A proof‐of‐concept application of existing trait‐based vulnerability assessment frameworks were applied to nine species from three different taxa (cetaceans, pinnipeds, marine fish) to determine their vul...

Despite the critical roles zooplankton play in marine food webs, the alterations to their communities by bivalve aquaculture have never been investigated empirically in Canadian waters. Collecting zooplankton data in bivalve aquaculture sites in a way that is interoperable over space and time is the first critical step to building consistent time s...

Aquaculture eco-certification is especially relevant in salmon farming where it has emerged as a popular corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy, providing global standards that can be applied to a globally traded commodity. However, eco-certification is just one of many CSR strategies used to address seafood sustainability at the corporate...

A circular economy is considered one way to reduce environmental impacts of human activities, by more efficient use of resources and recovery, resulting in less waste and emissions compared to linear take-make-dispose systems. Muscat et al. developed five ecological principles to guide biomass use towards a circular economy. A few studies have demo...

In aquatic environments, low dissolved oxygen concentrations can result in depressed bivalve defense systems while promoting anaerobic bacterial growth, ultimately leading to increased bivalve mortality rate. There are discrepancies between laboratory and field studies examining bivalve mortality under low oxygen conditions, possibly leading to an...

Aquaculture eco-certification schemes provide standards against which individual farms are assessed, and those farms that comply with eco-certification criteria receive certified status. These schemes aim to improve aquaculture sustainability, but the site-by-site approach of eco-certification can be a barrier to the inclusion of ecosystem perspect...

Ecological carrying capacity (ECC) indices for bivalve culture rely on key ecosystem turnover rates: 1. clearance time (CT), the time needed for the cultured bivalves to filter the entire bay volume; 2. renewal time (RT), the time required to replace the entire bay volume with external water; and 3. production time (PT), the time needed for phytopl...

The blue mussel (Mytilus edulis) is a widely distributed marine bivalve that is ecologically and commercially important. To predict mussel growth rates and optimize the production of mussels in spatially-limited coastal regions, it is important to understand how physiological traits differ between geographically distinct sources of mussels. This st...

The Working Group on Social and Economic Dimensions of Aquaculture (WGSEDA) addresses how to balance the negative and positive social and economic consequences of aquaculture development. A particular focus is placed on developing methods and indicators to assess the social and economic trade-offs of aquaculture. In this report, WGSEDA summarizes t...

Shallow coastal environments are becoming more susceptible to marine heatwaves, particularly in Atlantic Canada, which is experiencing higher rates of ocean warming compared with the global average. Understanding bivalves’ tolerance to heatwaves in Atlantic Canada is especially important, given the magnitude of bivalve aquaculture in this region. I...

Governance and management strategies for aquaculture development were examined for a select number of jurisdictions covering a range of marine aquaculture production to better understand the degree to which concepts of "Ecological Carrying Capacity" (ECC) are incorporated into management tools or permitting requirements for aquaculture development....

Calibration is a crucial step for the validation of computational models and a challenging task to accomplish. Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) theory has experienced an exponential rise in the number of published papers, which in large part has been made possible by the DEBtool toolbox. Multimodal evolutionary optimisation could provide DEBtool with ne...

Models of particulate waste production and deposition can be used in performance-based management approaches as cost-effective tools to assess environmental effects of open-pen finfish aquaculture. XLDEPMOD is an MS Excel® spreadsheet-based depositional model for predicting particulate organic carbon (POC) waste production and sedimentation from ne...

Both the aquaculture industry and eco-certification of aquaculture have grown significantly over the past 20 years, but the extent to which aquaculture eco-certification is effective in creating positive environmental and societal outcomes is uncertain. Therefore, a scoping review of research on the effectiveness of eco-certification in improving a...

Marine benthic environments serve as the ultimate sink for sediment organic matter (SOM), but shellfish farming can potentially disturb the natural sink of seston, altering ecosystem functioning. Understanding the potential disturbance of a shellfish farm and its ecological effects is therefore important for a responsible management of shellfish-me...

Energy is a fundamental currency of life that can be quantified in organisms to understand how environmental conditions and anthropogenic stressors affect individuals, scaling up to populations and entire ecosystems. Bioenergetics studies have been conducted extensively on fishes, with an historical focus on lab-based experiments relevant to fisher...

The feeding activity of bivalves is understood to change in response to a suite of environmental conditions, including food quantity and quality. It has been hypothesized that, by varying feeding rates in response to the available diet, bivalves may be able to maintain relatively stable ingestion rates, allowing them to have constant energy uptake...

Salmon farming has become a controversial topic, with public opposition and conflicts challenging the sustainability of the sector. As a result, a deeper understanding of public perceptions and factors influencing opinions becomes critical for developing sustainable and socially acceptable aquaculture. Based on previous social acceptance literature...

Aquaculture is a growing sector because of increased global demands for seafood; bivalve aquaculture production is also increasing in specific regions because of its perceived sustainability and similar environmental interactions across ecosystems. As socioeconomic impacts on prospective sites may differ, this research aimed to perform a high-level...

As climate change continues to warm oceans and exacerbate deoxygenation, coastal ecosystems and anthropogenic activities that occur there are left vulnerable. Fish cultured in ocean net pens are increasingly subjected to oxygen stress. Aeration and oxygenation have been utilized to improve oxygen conditions in pond aquaculture; however, their use i...

Aquaculture operations are currently the fastest-growing food production industry, increasing output over 20 times in the past few decades alone. Waste production on “fed” aquaculture farms, like Atlantic Salmon, is an issue for management and public perception. Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture (IMTA) is the co-cultivation of species from diffe...

Bivalve aquaculture may provide a variety of ecosystem services including nitrogen extraction from estuaries, which are often subject to excess nutrient loading from various land activities, causing eutrophication. This nitrogen extraction may be affected by a combination of various non-linear interactions between the cultured organisms and the rec...

Capture efficiency (CE) is the proportion of a given type of particle that is cleared from the water by gill filaments compared to other particles that are inhaled. The majority of research on CE variability in suspension-feeding bivalves has focused on particle characteristics (e.g., size, surface properties). This study was designed to explore CE...

This paper presents a novel spatio-temporal LSTM (SPATIAL) architecture for time series forecasting applied to environmental datasets. The framework was applied for three different ocean datasets: current speed, temperature, and dissolved oxygen. Network implementation proceeded in two directions that are nominally separated but connected as part o...

A circular economy (CE) is perceived as a way to reduce the environmental pressure of human activities including (blue)food production. In general, CE and its principles are still underexplored in aquaculture, although its fundamentals (i.e., the reuse, recycling, recovering nutrients, and energy) have already been largely applied. A recent study p...

Many bird species use features of the physical environment to cue breeding activity. We show that for 2 species of Pacific auks (zooplanktivorous Cassin’s auklet Ptychoramphus aleuticus and generalist rhinoceros auklet Cerorhinca monocerata ), spatio-temporal variation in marine production indicators surrounding a major breeding colony in the north...

The Atlantic salmon aquaculture industry has the potential to make a significant contribution to economic development and seafood production globally – particularly in rural and coastal communities. However, the lack of social licence to operate (SLO) can become a barrier for industry development. Greater transparency and communication have been su...

Understanding the ecological effects of bivalve farming on the ecosystem is needed to develop a responsible approach to marine management. The variations in the functional and trophic structure of the macrofaunal assemblage could be ideal indicators of these potential ecological effects. In this study, macrofaunal assemblage were investigated the i...

The need to employ management strategies that recognize ecosystem services and their trade-offs is considered a cornerstone for the implementation of an Ecosystem Approach to Aquaculture (EAA), yet it is unclear how to operationalize these concepts. Here, the role of certification and sustainable seafood ranking programs (sustainability schemes) in...

The contribution of knowledge, concepts and perspectives from physiological ecology to conservation decision-making has become critical for understanding and acting upon threats to the persistence of sensitive species. Here we review applications of dynamic energy budget (DEB) theory to conservation issues and discuss how this theory for metabolic...

In Canada, Atlantic salmon (S. salar) aquaculture has been growing rapidly and is consistently being promoted for its potential to support economic growth and employment opportunities, particularly in rural communities. However, salmon aquaculture is a controversial topic, making acquiring and maintaining social acceptance an enduring challenge. Th...

The effects of harmful algae on bivalve physiology are complex and involve both physiological and behavioural responses. Studying those responses is essential to better describe and predict their impact on shellfish aquaculture and health risk for humans. In this study we recorded for two months the physiological response of the blue mussel Mytilus...

Aquaculture, or the farmed production of fish and shellfish, has grown rapidly, from supplying just 7% of fish for human consumption in 1974 to more than half in 2016. This rapid expansion has led to the growth of Precision Aquaculture concept that aims to exploit data-driven management of fish production, thereby improving the farmer's ability to...

The health and welfare of farmed fish are highly dependent on environmental conditions. Under suboptimal conditions, the negative impact on welfare can cause changes in fish behaviour. Acoustic tags can provide high resolution and high frequency data to monitor fish positioning within the cage, which can be used to infer swimming behaviour. In this...

Carrying Capacity (CC) has emerged as a potential tool to sustainably manage human activities such as aquaculture. However, interdisciplinary and integrated frameworks for holistic CC assessments are still missing. The goal of this study was to generate expert consensus on best evaluative practices for holistic CC assessments of ocean-based salmon...

The ecosystem approach to aquaculture (EAA) is a strategy for the sustainable development of the aquaculture sector, but the question of how it can be practically implemented remains unclear. Indicators that can be applied at relevant scales of impact and that reflect the environmental status and change offer a means of operationalizing EAA. Theref...

Sustained periods of anoxia, driven by eutrophication, threaten coastal marine systems and can lead to mass mortalities of even resilient animals such as bivalves. While mortality rates under anoxia are well-studied, the specific mechanism(s) of mortality are less clear. We used a suite of complementary techniques (LT50, histology, 16S rRNA amplico...

Finfish aquaculture is a source of dissolved nutrients, which can impact water quality in the wider environment. Therefore, the potential effects of dissolved nutrient loading must be considered if management is to transition towards an Ecosystem Approach to Aquaculture. In this study, the dissolved nitrogen dispersion pattern from a rainbow trout...

Bivalve aquaculture requires the alteration of natural populations of filter-feeders by artificially increasing their density. A bivalve farm could have negative consequences for the ecosystem if the filtration pressure of stocked biomass surpasses the capacity of the system to replenish the depleted resources. The concept of ecological carrying ca...

Open ocean fish farming involves containment of cultured animals under environmental conditions influenced by seasonal variation and water quality. Recently, an important area of research focus has been on water quality monitoring to improve aquaculture management. The development of novel sensors that report in real-time is critical to improve the...

This paper presents a novel spatio-temporal LSTM (SPATIAL) architecture for time series forecasting applied to environmental datasets. The framework was evaluated across multiple sensors and for three different oceanic variables: current speed, temperature, and dissolved oxygen. Network implementation proceeded in two directions that are nominally...

Parameterization is one of the most challenging steps in the construction of individual-based models, and it is particularly relevant for the case of Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) theory given that DEB parameters are mapped to a multimodal fitness landscape. This multimodal fitness landscape could correspond to parameterizations that provide the righ...

Estuarine environments are highly heterogeneous habitats where numerous organisms interact with each other. Aquaculture systems encompass such interactions, and the eventual yields depend on how the cultivated species respond to the environmental heterogeneity. Marine mussels are calcifying organisms that rely on calcium carbonate shell and byssus...

Until very recently, governments of many countries, as well as their supporting organizations, have primarily addressed the biological, technical and economic aspects of aquaculture. In contrast, social and cultural aspects of aquaculture production have taken a backseat. Drawing on the observation that aquaculture development in Western Societies...

Assessing the carrying capacity of ecosystems is crucial to the selection of suitable and sustainable locations for aquaculture farms. In Malpeque Bay (PEI, Canada), the potential expansion of mussel farms has driven a series of numerical modelling studies. We coupled sub-models for sea lettuce, wild and cultured oysters and wild softshell clams to...

This paper focuses on the availability of economic indicators and metrics to assess effects of marine aquaculture production in the North-Atlantic area (the EU, Norway, Canada and USA), including also social and environmental effects. We consider how aquaculture planning and management is organised in the different countries and the usefulness of e...

Macroalgae can incorporate the isotopic signature (δ 15 N) of their external environment and be used as 'bioin-dicators' to map and identify between multiple sources of anthropogenic nitrogen. However, evidence suggests that the isotopic signature of their tissues can also be influenced by a range of other factors, which could confound their use as...

With ever-expanding marine aquaculture, calls for sustainable development become louder. The concept of aquaculture carrying capacity (CC) emerged 30 years ago to frame development, though so far, most studies have focused on the production and ecological components, leaving aside the social perspective. Often, estimations are carried out a posteri...

Global aquaculture is one of the fastest growing food industries, accounting for approximately half of all finfish and invertebrate production as of 2016. In Canada, provincial governments are pushing strongly for the development of the industry, which creates a problem in that governments are both regulators and promoters of the industry. In Newfo...

Aquaculture is one of the world’s fastest growing food production sectors and presents an opportunity for rural community development that can support coastal livelihoods. An ecosystem approach to aquaculture (EAA) has been recommended to facilitate socially and environmentally sustainable development, yet there remains a need to better involve peo...

Macroalgal blooms in eutrophic coastal waters around the globe constitute a rising issue for ecosystems and economic activities. Sometimes leading to anoxic events, a better understanding of its growth dynamics is necessary to develop mitigation strategies and inform policies on nutrient runoff management. The development of a Dynamic Energy Budget...

Sea lice are one of the most economically costly and ecologically concerning problems facing the salmon farming industry. Here, we validated a coupled biological and physical model that simulated sea lice larvae dispersal from salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago (BA), British Columbia, Canada. We employed a concept from ecological agent-based...

Human activities can elevate coastal levels of dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN). As macroalgae readily absorb and accumulate DIN, the elemental (total N and C:N ratio) composition of their tissues is less affected by temporal fluctuations compared to more direct measures of DIN concentration. Additionally, their isotopic (δ15N) composition can re...

Warming waters are changing marine pathogen dispersal patterns and infectivity worldwide. Coupled biological–physical modelling has been used in many systems to determine the connectivity of metapopulations via infectious disease particles. Here we model the connectivity of sea lice larvae (Lepeophtheirus salmonis) among salmon farms in the Brought...

Carrying capacity has become a fundamental concept within the context of environmental management. Carrying capacity for aquaculture has been studied since the 1960s and has attracted a dedicated literature focused on measuring the environmental and production limits of aquaculture developments. Nevertheless, management and policy face emerging cha...

Climate change, observed as warming sea surface temperatures, is expected to impact the Eastern coast of Canada at a rate higher than the global average. Changes in marine abiotic conditions will impact the growth and performance of economically important bivalve species, creating an increasingly uncertain future for the bivalve aquaculture industr...

The growing demand for aquaculture products can only be maintained by increasing the production of lower trophic species such as bivalves and tunicates. Low trophic species avoid the energy losses during trophic transfers to build animal protein, making them ideal candidates to exploit available resources in coastal waters. In the particular case o...

Marine mussel aggregations act as a substratum and refuge for many fouling species. Mussel cultivation in Galicia, Spain, is carried out on hanging ropes in subtidal systems. The fauna associated with this cultivation includes a large number of invertebrates that compete for space or food with the mussels, or use their clusters as a refuge from pre...

Bivalve aquaculture is an expanding industry and there is a strong need for the identification of ecologically and socially feasible levels of aquaculture production in order to promote sustainable growth. In this context, the concept of carrying capacity serves to determine acceptable limits for aquaculture expansion. This study compares three cas...

Connectivity in an aquatic setting is determined by a combination of hydrodynamic circulation and the biology of the organisms driving linkages. These complex processes can be simulated in coupled biological-physical models. The physical model refers to an underlying circulation model defined by spatially-explicit nodes, often incorporating a parti...

The timing of the juvenile Atlantic salmon ocean-entry is considered a critical stage in the species’ life-history. Entry into the ocean at suboptimal times can have negative survival impacts on entire smolt cohorts. Previous studies have identified smolt residency time in the Bras d’Or Lakes as highly variable and correlated with body condition. T...

Understanding why a species occupies a certain geographic range and predicting how they will be affected by climate change require characterizing physiological traits in geographically-distant populations. The objective of this study was to perform a direct comparison of two eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) populations that occupy contrasting...

This report provides insight on feeding pressures of cultivated blue mussels Mytilus edulis and the invasive solitary tunicate Styela clava on phytoplankton and zooplankton, including American lobster (Homarus americanus) larvae (stages I and IV). In 2015-2016, experiments were conducted in a portable aquatic laboratory on Prince Edward Island (PEI...

Globally, the production of marine bivalves has been steadily increasing over the past several decades. As the effects of human population growth are magnified, bivalves help provide food security as a source of inexpensive protein. However, as climate change alters sea surface temperatures (SST), the physiology, and thus the survival, growth, and...

There are few data on Crassostrea virginica physiological rates across the range of salinities and temperatures to which they are regularly exposed, and this limits the applicability of growth and production models using these data. The objectives of this study were to quantify, in winter (17 °C) and summer (27 °C), the clearance and oxygen consump...

Bivalve aquaculture has become increasingly important for marine protein production and is an alternative to exploiting natural resources. Its further and sustainable development should follow an ecosystem approach, to maintain both biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. The identification of critical thresholds to development remains difficult. T...