Marine environmental impact assessment of abalone,Haliotis discus hannai,cage farm in Wan-do,Republic of Korea

To assess the marine environmental impacts of abalone, Haliotis discus hannai, cage farms in Wan-do, we monitored the benthic environment on top of the sediment underneath cage farm stations and reference stations. We applied two methods for this assessment. One was the A- and B-investigation of the MOM system (Modeling–On fish farm–Monitoring) developed in Norway. The other was a general environmental monitoring method which is widely used. In this study, we found benthic animals in all samples that belonged to condition 1 which were based on group 1(presence of macrofauna) of the B-investigation method. The values of redox potential (group 2–pH, redox potential) in all samples were above +65 mV belonging to condition 1. Based on sensory results (group 3–gas, color, odor, thickness of deposits), five out of seven experiment samples showed condition 1 while stations 2 and 7 showed condition 2, which have been cultured for 10 years in semi-closed waters. As group 2 takes precedence over group 3, the level of the conditions for B-investigation results consequently showed condition 1 in all stations. We found that pollutants and trace metals in the sediment underneath cage farms were lower than the pollution standard. This led us to conclude that the environmental impacts of the cage farms in this study were not significant.     

Entrapment of clay particles enhances durability of bacterial biofilm-associated bioclogging in sand

Acta Geotechnica - Utilization of bacterial biofilms and extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) for engineered bioclogging has recently garnered increasing attention in various geotechnical...