Abstract
Seaweed aquaculture is a rapidly growing component of marine food production, but the capacity to control seaweed growth lacks behind that of land agriculture. Seaweed growth requires nutrients, acquired from dissolved pools through their fronds, and light, and, as may also be density-dependent, but general relationships between seaweed growth, nutrient concentration and incident irradiance are not yet available. We used a dataset of 1729 experimental assessments of seaweed specific growth rates and density under various nutrient and irradiance levels retrieved from the published literature to examine the relationship between seaweed growth, density, irradiance and nutrient concentration. This analysis confirmed strong density-dependence of seaweed specific growth rates, and further confirmed that nutrient and irradiance limitation strongly impose density-dependent seaweed growth. These findings demonstrate that nutrient and irradiance limitation modulate density-dependent seaweed growth, and can help maximize growth rates in seaweed aquaculture, a rapidly growing component of global aquaculture production, by manipulating stocking density where nutrients are scarce and/or underwater light penetration poor.
Highlights
Plant stands typically show an upper, size-dependent limit to their abundance, which is expressed in the self-thinning law (Westoby, 1984)
Nutrient limitation may pose an additional constraint to the upper limit of seaweed density beyond which is imposed by light-limitation through self-shading
These searches yielded a total of 164 papers reporting growth rates and biomass density for seaweed
Summary
Plant stands typically show an upper, size-dependent limit to their abundance, which is expressed in the self-thinning law (Westoby, 1984) Whereas this relationship has been described across terrestrial and aquatic plants (Arenas et al, 2002; Reynolds and Ford, 2005; Li et al, 2013), the upper density for terrestrial plants is about 10-fold higher than that for aquatic photosynthetic organisms, for a given size (Agusti et al, 1987; Duarte and Kalff, 1987). We do so through an analysis of the role of nutrients, density and irradiance in modulating the density-dependence of seaweed growth based on a comparative analysis of data on specific growth rates of seaweed across a range of densities under controlled nutrient conditions in the laboratory and aquaculture farms
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