About This Project

Edible seaweeds provide a sustainable source of healthy food and ecosystem services, including habitat for marine animals, oxygen for life, and uptake of excess nitrogenous wastes. Cleaner waters in NYC and advances in ocean farming make this a good time to make edible seaweeds part of local food. Our goal is accomplishing a critical step towards this goal, namely, determining a key growth parameter (nitrogen loading) in a micro nursery for the edible seaweed nori.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Decades of industrialization, habitat destruction, and over fishing in urban areas necessitate not only a conservation but also a restoration approach. Regenerative ocean farming is a potentially transformative approach to meet these challenges. Seaweeds are important components of ocean farming because they provide oxygen, remove nitrogen pollution, and can also be edible. To introduce regenerative ocean farming into degraded ecosystems, it is necessary to establish land-based nurseries to propagate and transplant healthy seedlings into the sea. Several research laboratories and non-profits along the east coast of the U.S. have established the feasibility and protocols for seaweed cultivation. It is an opportune time to expand these approaches.

What is the significance of this project?

Edible seaweeds are significant agricultural products in Asia and provide important ecosystem services (producing oxygen, nitrogen uptake, habitat). This project is part of a longer term objective of establishing seaweed cultivation in NYC waters for the ecosystem services they provide and their potential for local food. If seaweeds can be cultivated on a large scale, we believe their oxygen production and nitrogen removal would complement restoration ecology efforts, such as the billion oyster project. We are choosing to focus on nori because it is possibly the best tasting of the edible seaweeds that grow locally, and also because it complements efforts by the non-profit Greenwave and others to establish kelp farming.

What are the goals of the project?

We are aiming to determine whether growth media that mimics the local waters (nitrate and ammonia) is superior to a growth media with only nitrate concentrations (1 mole / liter) recommended in the New England Seaweed Culture Handbook. Our endpoint assessments are bladelet size, morphology, and growth rate . Our hypothesis is that growth media that mimics natural waters will yield superior growth rates because the seaweed physiology is optimized for their natural environment, which contains both nitrogen sources. We will follow growing protocols from the New England Seaweed Culture Handbook. We will determine average ammonia and nitrate concentrations from the field site where the nori will be collected in Jamaica Bay using our test kits and measurements made by the NYC DEP.