Arua Christiana’s research while affiliated with ICT University and other places

Aquaculture, which is the breeding of fishes in artificial ponds, seems to be gaining popularity among urban and sub-urban dwellers in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Tenant aquaculture enables individuals irrespective of their profession to grow fishes locally in a little space. However, there are challenges facing aquaculture such as the availability of water, how to monitor and manage water quality, and more seriously, the problem of absence of dataset with which the farmer can use as a guide for fish breeding. Aquaponics is a system that combines conventional aquaculture with hydroponics (the method of growing plants in water i.e. soilless farming of crops). It uses these two technologies in a symbiotic combination in which the plant uses the waste from the fish as food while at the same time filtering the water for immediate re-use by the fish. This helps to solve the problem of frequent change of water. An Internet of Things (IoT) system consisting of an ESP-32 microcontroller which controls water quality sensors in aquaponics fish ponds was designed and developed for automatic data collection. The sensors include temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, ammonia and nitrate sensors. The IoT system reads water quality data and uploads the same to the cloud in real time. The dataset is visualized in the cloud and downloaded for the purposes of data analytics and decision-making. We present the dataset in this paper. The dataset will be very useful to the agriculture, aquaculture, data science and machine learning communities. The insights such dataset will provide when subjected to machine learning and data analytics will be very useful to fish farmers, informing them when to change the pond water, what stocking density to apply, provide knowledge about feed conversion ratios, and in predict the growth rate and patterns of their fishes.