Ocean monitoring seen as key to N.E.

BRISTOL, R.I. – The New England region should increase fish farming and develop a system to monitor ocean conditions to ensure a healthy and growing marine economy, scientists, government officials and business people said Monday.

Speakers at a conference on the future of the region’s marine economy said it was crucial for businesses and government to invest in research to develop those areas because the region’s success is so closely tied to the ocean. The conference was sponsored by Roger Williams University and the regional business group The New England Council.

A potential anchor for New England’s future marine economy is the development of ocean monitoring systems that would allow scientists and others to track the ocean climate, said Hauke Lite-Powell, a research specialist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

Two federal agencies are launching programs to monitor the oceans, said James Luyten, Woods Hole’s acting president and director. The National Science Foundation plans to invest in a system of coastal, regional and global networks of observatories, named ORION, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration plans IOOS, or an Integrated and Sustained Ocean Observing System, to provide information on the state of the oceans.

Woods Hole and other institutions are bidding to build the systems, and decisions are expected within several months, Luyten said. Once the money is awarded, he said, the systems could be up and running in a few years.

The information could be used by a broad range of interests: a shipping firm trying to decide the best time to send a ship out of port, a search-and-rescue operation or in the nation’s defense.

Lite-Powell said a monitoring system could contribute $10 million to $20 million per year to the region’s economy in the short term for the development and installation of the technology. Down the road, it could contribute $150 million annually, including increases in the technology sector and direct benefits to those who use the system, such as the firm that can better time its shipments.

“Ultimately, we have to have a system which is comparable to what we have for the weather,” Layton said during a break in the conference.

He said building a regional system could include doing things like adding technology to existing buoys off the coast of New England and also sending out undersea robots along a set path to patrol conditions. The robots could also be self-directed. For example, he said, if they detect something unusual in the water, they could change their path to go find the source.

Timothy Scott, a professor of environmental science at Roger Williams, said another key piece of the puzzle is aquaculture, such as fish and shellfish farming or the farming of seaweed.

The United States imports 80 percent of its seafood, and at the same time the nation’s appetite for seafood is growing. But 90 percent of the world’s aquaculture is in Asia, and only a small sliver is in the United States.

Maine, for example, farms salmon. Rhode Island seeds Narragansett Bay with shellfish every year. Most of the states also farm trout, Scott said. The region’s aquaculture sales stand at $60 million per year, he said, half what it was a decade ago because of disease in salmon and shellfish.

Scott said Rhode Island provided a good model for other states because of moves it made to streamline regulations, include fishermen in decision-making and increase legislative support of the industry.

In the early 1990s, there was almost no aquaculture in the Ocean State, Scott said. Now, the value of cultured oysters harvested in Rhode Island is nearly $1 million per year.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the conference’s keynote speaker, described New England’s bays and ocean as great treasures. “It’s imperative that we look at our oceans and resources as something to conserve and protect and not just something to exploit.”