Federating ‘Aquaculture 4.0’ for data-driven social and environmental sustainability

Aquaculture is undergoing a revolution of data-driven innovation. The rapid uptake of digital technologies in the sector contributes ever larger amounts of data that hold potential for improving decision making for aquatic food system sustainability. Realising the potential of digital tools and new data streams is, however, not inevitable. The current ecosystem of global and production-level digital aquaculture technologies and platforms is highly fragmented with a strong focus on private farm-level data for improving production efficiency, and limited publicly available data that can be used for social and environmental sustainability. Three scenarios for the future development of the aquaculture data ecosystem are possible (1) continued fragmentation; (2) centralisation, and (3) coordination in a federated ecosystem. Recognising a federated ecosystem as having the most potential for contributing to food system sustainability we provide three priority areas for improving data coverage, sharing and integration between and among farm-level and global platforms.