Recent Advances in Hydroponic and Aquaponic Research

A topical collection in Horticulturae (ISSN 2311-7524). This collection belongs to the section "Protected Culture".

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Editor

Biological and Environmental Engineering, Riley Robb Hall—111 Wing Drive, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
Interests: controlled environment agriculture; recirculating aquaculture systems; entrepreneurship; renewable energy systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Topical Collection Information

Dear Colleagues,

Aquaponics is gaining increasing attention and is becoming a more accepted method of growing organic vegetables. We are launching a Topical Collection on this timely topic to follow up on a Special Issue we released 2 years ago, which focused on hydroponics. We also welcome papers on hydroponics, since this field continues to see scientific advances on an ongoing basis. The science around aquaponics is increasing our in-depth knowledge at an accelerating pace, hence the need for this Topical Collection on “Recent Advances in Aquaponic and Hydroponic Research”. To give us a common base of understanding, hydroponics is the soilless culturing of plants in a nutrient solution that contains all the necessary elemental ions for healthy plant growth. The production of fruits and vegetables using hydroponic techniques continues to accelerate due to its increased nutrient and space-use efficiencies, and is frequently used commercially in modified and controlled environment agriculture (CEA) to produce high-nutrient-density crops (fruits and vegetables). A driving force behind the accelerated adoption of hydroponics is the increasing scarcity of water resources, since hydroponic production uses 90% less water than conventional field crop production. Fish culturing, as practiced using the recirculation of water coupled to various water treatment unit processes, is called recirculating aquaculture systems or RAS. When you combine RAS with hydroponics, the result is an aquaponic system. RAS and hydroponic systems may be operated as coupled (water goes back and forth between the two systems) or decoupled, where water moves from the RAS system to the hydroponic system and does not return. There are advantages to both systems.

We must learn to grow more food with less water and grow our food closer to the consumer if we want to create a more sustainable future. Aquaponic farming is becoming a critical part of the local food production equation. Aquaponics appeals to those who have heightened concerns about the sustainability of our food production systems. Aquaponics provides the opportunity to produce food in the most sustainable manner possible. It is possible to engineer an aquaponics system that captures all the nutrients contained in fish feed by sizing a coupled hydroponic system with sufficient plants to assimilate all the nutrients that the fish have not assimilated in their growing process. Although hydroponics and aquaponics have been practiced for centuries, we are still discovering how plants function in an aquatic environment as well as how we can optimize their performance, particularly from an environment sustainability perspective—hence the need for this Topical Collection.

In this Topical Collection we will collect current research papers on how to employ aquaponic and hydroponic technologies in the future to provide nutritious diets with which to feed the additional 2 billion humans that will be added to our current population of 7.7 billion by 2050. We also need to understand how our current aquaponic and hydroponic systems are working. We invite manuscripts that explore any aspect of this research topic, including new technologies and growing strategies, new aquaculture products such as seaweeds or other market-driven products, review papers, and traditional research papers. Topics could include nutrient and physiological plant analyses and mass balances, the business side of the equation to analyze the financial aspects of enterprise models, and everything in between. We look forward to receiving your manuscript.

Prof. Dr. Michael Timmons
Collection Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the collection website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Horticulturae is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • aquaponics
  • hydroponics
  • organic
  • inorganic
  • sustainability
  • engineering mass balances
  • economics

Published Papers (3 papers)

2022

Jump to: 2021

16 pages, 1679 KiB  
Article
Determination of Phylloplane Associated Bacteria of Lettuce from a Small-Scale Aquaponic System via 16S rRNA Gene Amplicon Sequence Analysis
by Nasser Kasozi, Horst Kaiser and Brendan Wilhelmi
Horticulturae 2022, 8(2), 151; https://doi.org/10.3390/horticulturae8020151 - 10 Feb 2022
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2397
Abstract
Fresh vegetables harbour diverse bacterial populations on their surfaces which are important for plant health and growth. Information on epiphytic bacteria is limited to only a few types of vegetables and it is unknown how the lettuce epiphytic bacterial community structure may respond [...] Read more.
Fresh vegetables harbour diverse bacterial populations on their surfaces which are important for plant health and growth. Information on epiphytic bacteria is limited to only a few types of vegetables and it is unknown how the lettuce epiphytic bacterial community structure may respond when a probiotic product is added to an aquaponic system. In this study, we evaluated lettuce growth and analysed epiphytic bacterial communities of lettuce based on metabarcoding analysis of the V3-V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene obtained from paired-end Illumina MiSeq reads. The addition of Bacillus probiotics resulted in a significant increase of nitrate and phosphate in the deep-water culture solution, as well as increased vegetative growth of lettuce. Metabarcoding analysis revealed that the most abundant phyla on lettuce leaf surfaces were Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, and Actinobacteria. The in-depth bacterial composition analysis indicated that genera Chryseobacterium, Bacillus, Pantoea, Pseudoduganella, Flavobacterium, Paludibacter, and Cloacibacterium were dominant in leaf samples obtained from Bacillus-treated systems. Analysis of lettuce epiphytic bacterial communities of the fresh lettuce leaf surfaces also indicated the presence of food-borne pathogens belonging to the Shigella and Aeromonas genera, which were less abundant in the probiotic treated systems. This study provides the first characterization of the epiphytic bacterial community structure and how it can be modulated by the addition of a probiotic mixture to the nutrient solution of aquaponic systems. Full article
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14 pages, 2079 KiB  
Article
Complementary Nutrients in Decoupled Aquaponics Enhance Basil Performance
by Dylan Rodgers, Eugene Won, Michael B. Timmons and Neil Mattson
Horticulturae 2022, 8(2), 111; https://doi.org/10.3390/horticulturae8020111 - 26 Jan 2022
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 3768
Abstract
Aquaponics combines raising fish and growing plants by recycling water and nutrients to reduce water consumption and reliance on chemical fertilizers. Coupled aquaponics systems recirculate water between fish and plant crops, whereas decoupled systems send mineralized fish effluent and wastewater unidirectionally to an [...] Read more.
Aquaponics combines raising fish and growing plants by recycling water and nutrients to reduce water consumption and reliance on chemical fertilizers. Coupled aquaponics systems recirculate water between fish and plant crops, whereas decoupled systems send mineralized fish effluent and wastewater unidirectionally to an independent hydroponic loop. Decoupling enables changes to the water, such as pH adjustments and complementary nutrient additions, to promote plant performance. In this study, basil, Ocimum basilicum (L.), was transplanted into 4 L containers filled with decoupled aquaponic (DAP), nutrient-complemented decoupled aquaponic (DAP+), or chemical-based conventional hydroponic (CON) nutrient solutions and grown for 21 days at pH 5.8. Plants grown in DAP+ and CON had greater biomass, height, and Soil Plant Analysis Development (SPAD) chlorophyll index and lower root:shoot biomass ratios than those in DAP. Shoot fresh and dry biomass was 11% greater for CON than DAP+, while height, SPAD chlorophyll index, and root:shoot ratio did not differ. We concluded that added nutrients in DAP+ enhanced performance compared to DAP, and the biologically derived nutrition in DAP+ enhanced performance to be similar, but not equal, to CON. We cannot recommend specific adjustments to the targeted blend of complementary nutrients tested, but findings suggest that complementary nutrients are effective in decoupled aquaponics. Full article
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2021

Jump to: 2022

13 pages, 18346 KiB  
Article
Effects of Selenium on the Chlorophylls, Gas Exchange, Antioxidant Activity and Amino Acid Composition of Lettuce Grown under an Aquaponics System
by María Carmen Piñero, Ginés Otálora, Jacinta Collado-González, Josefa López-Marín and Francisco M. del Amor
Horticulturae 2022, 8(1), 30; https://doi.org/10.3390/horticulturae8010030 - 28 Dec 2021
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 2030
Abstract
Aquaponics is a sustainable technique that is respectful to the environment, as it reuses products and minimizes the consumption of new materials. The combination of this technique with the foliar application of selenium (as Na2SeO4) could lead to healthier [...] Read more.
Aquaponics is a sustainable technique that is respectful to the environment, as it reuses products and minimizes the consumption of new materials. The combination of this technique with the foliar application of selenium (as Na2SeO4) could lead to healthier and more sustainable products, which are increasingly requested by consumers. Lettuce (Lactuca sativa L.) plants were grown in an aquaponics system (fish water) as compared with a control (conventional soilless fertigation), and sprayed with different concentrations of selenium (0, 4, 8, and 16 µmol L−1). The results showed a reduction in the dry weight and N content of lettuce plants irrigated with the fish water mixture treatment. However, the application of Se relieved this stress, increasing the photosynthetic rate and ABTS, and reducing the content of chlorophylls, β-carotene, and several of the measured amino acids. The best results were observed with the highest concentration of Se (16 µmol L−1), as an increase in nitrogen content was observed, as shown by a greater weight of the plant. Furthermore, this treatment produced the greatest increase in ABTS and the least reduction in amino acid content. This novel study highlights the possibility of improving the efficiency of N utilization in lettuce by applying foliar selenium in combination with an aquaponics system. Full article
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