Ferramentas tecnológicas para a resiliência e segurança de bivalves marinhos de aquacultura e selvagens e aumento da sua produção em Portugal

The main goals are to 1) establish guidelines for management of sustainable production in bivalve farming, 2) identify the main biological and non-biological risks associated with production and 3) make available for industry state of the art tools for real time monitoring of health status, quality, and safety of commercially important bivalves. The goals are ambitious and will contribute to the sustainable expansion of bivalve production in Portugal, safeguard unique wild marine bivalve populations and consolidate and build on the advantages of this food production sector benefiting from the natural advantages of the Portuguese marine environment. Socioeconomic relevance will be maximised, by focussing on 3 important commercial species in four main coastal regions of Portugal where bivalve production is an important activity. The project activities will establish strategies for management of production and in this way contribute to the sustainable expansion of the bivalve industry in Portugal. Bivalves, either farmed or captured, are highly valued by consumers since they are a tasty, healthy and nutritious food, with Portugal having one of the world’s highest per capita consumption and aquaculture production of seafood products, particularly with the tripling of shellfish farming in the last 10 years. However, intensive bivalve farming and harvesting of wild populations has impacted the marine ecosystem, as revealed by the fluctuations in the total farmed production, with the number of catches stagnating, due to intensive adult and seed capture activities and the associated depletion of natural stocks. The success of bivalve production depends entirely on the marine environment and unpredictable natural phenomena and the ever-increasing threats from anthropogenic pressure and pollution represent a risk for industry sustainability. Furthermore, overharvesting, along with the likely increased incidence of disease outbreak due to shifting pathogen abundance with climate change further exacerbate the risks. No tools designed for monitoring of these risks in areas of shellfish exploitation are currently available, this is one of the major challenges the project will address. The project goals are ambitious and will advance the state of the art of bivalve population genetics, genomics, resilience, pathogens, and wild and aquaculture bivalves. A holist approach will be taken to identify risks for bivalve populations exploited for human consumption and the impact of the increased exploitation by industry (farmed or capture) in important production regions from North to South of Portugal. Few studies exist, focusing on specific coastal production regions or individual species and here we will provide a global understanding of this industry using state of the art omics technologies (genomics, transcriptomics and metagenomics) to characterise bivalve populations and molecular quality biomarkers for monitoring production quality and safety. Moreover, comparative studies using wild and farmed populations have not been performed and this will greatly advance the state-of-art in understanding bivalve genetics, immunology, disease transmission and reservoirs and the impact of environmental factors, including bivalve pathogens. The overall goal of the project is to provide farmers and local authorities tools for risk assessment, disease monitoring and mitigation to promote the sustainable growth of the bivalve industry in Portugal.