CEE Seminar (ZOOM): Seaweed Energy - Evaluating the Potential for Offshore Cultivation of Macroalgae for Biofuels

Abstract: The United States has the world’s largest marine exclusive economic zone and has the potential to build and grow a thriving marine biomass industry for the production of fuels, chemicals, feed and food. But in order to assess the possibility of offshore cultivation, the aquaculture industry and regulators need an improved set of tools for locating optimal macroalgal farm sites, evaluating farm designs, assessing new macroalgal cultivation techniques to maximize productivity, and for predicting the influence of cultivation on coastal ecosystems. We have developed a flexible MacroAlgae Cultivation MODeling System (MACMODS) that integrates a regional ocean model, a fine-scale hydrodynamic model, and a macroalgal growth model. MACMODS is capable of resolving the complex interplay of farm macroalgal canopy with currents, waves, turbulence, ever-changing nutrient and light fields, and biological processes. Here we will present the computational framework of MACMODS, model results from the analysis of farm design and provide an assessment of offshore macroalgal farming potential for Southern California.

Bio: Kristen Davis joined the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at UC Irvine in 2012. She is a physical coastal oceanographer who is interested in studying circulation in the coastal ocean, its natural variability and influence on marine ecosystems and human-nature interactions. Davis earned a doctorate in civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University in 2009 and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington.