A team consisting of several professors from the Department of Electronic Engineering at the National Taipei University of Technology has developed a symbiotic ecosystem between fish culture and vegetable hydroponics, according to the team.
In the symbiotic ecosystem, water in fish-culture ponds is used to cultivate vegetable with the fish's excrement being fertilizer for vegetable, and because the nutrition for vegetable helps purify such water, the water is pumped into fish-culture ponds for reuse. When the recycling of fish-culture water reaches an equilibrium, it is only necessary to add fish feed and fresh water to make up loss due to natural evaporation.
In order to attain the equilibrium, the team uses an in-house-developed cloud computing-based system to monitor vegetable growth. It has an IoT (Internet of Things) sensing module to measure the sysyem's light, temperature, humidity, pH value, electric conductivity of the water and other parameters as well as sending data for cloud computing-based analysis.
The IoT sensing module is equipped with GPS functionality and web cameras and can send real-time monitoring data to smartphones for users to control environmental conditions of the symbiotic ecosystem.
For optimal environmental conditions, parameter such as LED lighting, temperatures and depth of water are set depending on breeds of fish and varieties of vegetable.
Article translated by Adam Hwang
