Native-Nori: UK-Native Seaweed (Nori) Aquaculture for Nutrient-Dense, Low Resource-Use Foods

Vision: To develop an aquaculture technology to cultivate novel seaweed food ingredients with superior nutritional value and a net positive impact on the environment.

Innovation: The aquaculture technology will consist of three core steps;
1\. To harvest wild reproductive seaweed,
2\. To germinate juvenile seaweed in an aquaculture system,
3\. To grow-out and harvest seaweed in an intertidal growout system.
Each process step is designed to consume minimal resources with the final step providing valuable ecosystem services such as remediating eutrophic coastal waters, sequestering dissolved carbon dioxide and providing nutrition and habitat for intertidal marine life.

Project Focus:
The project aims to assess the technical, economic and environmental feasibility of implementing a novel aquaculture process. Plant Ecology Beyond Land CIC (PEBL) has the expertise in seaweed analysis, seed harvesting and marine engineering. Collaborator Pontus Research Ltd (PR) has the complimentary expertise in aquaculture cultivation. The outcome of this collaboration will be a comprehensive feasibility assessment that will provide detailed operational plans, environmental impacts, and the financial viability to run such an operation over the long term.

Objectives:
- Monitor, analyse and harvest seaweed starter seeds.
- Trial incubation of seaweed seeds into juvenile seaweeds and transferring these onto nets.
- Deploying seeded nets out in an intertidal site and monitoring the growth development.
- Assessment of seaweed quality, environmental footprint and ecosystem service provision potential.

Impact:
Native-Nori will provide a new means of producing highly nutritional food (average of 25% protein) with limited land-use, low energy input and zero-use of chemicals. In addition, the growth of seaweed absorbs excess nitrogen, phosphates and carbon dioxide and creates new habitats for intertidal wildlife. This has the potential to provide further net positive environmental impacts on the environment.

The project will allow PEBL and PR to generating revenues of £1.7m and 18 new jobs by 2025 assuming a sea farm of 30 hectares producing a dry weight (DW) of 16 ton/ha\*yr (compared to average production of 2.3ton/ha\*yr for soya and 5.1ton/ha\*yr for corn) sold at an average price of £2,000/ton raw and £45,000/ton dried and packaged. This sea farm would have the potential to create an additional income through providing ecosystem services by sequestering 0.32, 0.032 and 4.36 tons/ha/year of excess nitrogen, phosphate and CO2 respectively \[World Bank Group, 2016\].