Seaweed aquaculture—From historic trends to current innovation

From February 9 to 12, 2020, we organized a special session at the Aquaculture of America meetings held at the Hawai'i Convention Center in Honolulu on the island of Oahu. The session, entitled “Seaweed aquaculture – from historic trends to current innovation” included over 20 presenters. The session encompassed the breadth of seaweed research that has arisen in the last decade and beyond. It spanned topics from seaweed tank and pond cultivation, off-shore design and deployment, genetics and strain selection, algae education, uses and processing of algae for food, feed and biofuel, and the compounding challenges facing this developing industry. Currently, the global seaweed industry is valued at more than US $11 billion, and is dominated by production in Asian countries including China, Indonesia, Korea, and Japan (FAO, 2020). Almost 97% of this global supply is aquaculture-sourced seaweeds (Costa-Pierce, 2021; Costa-Pierce & Chopin, 2021; Piconi, Veidenheimer, & Bob, 2020).