Flavia Tavares De Matos from EMBRAPA, the Brazilian agricultural research corporation, has visited the TAPAS team at University of Stirling last week to find out more about TAPAS and discuss the Scottish freshwater lake case study. Flavia works on carrying capacity in large Brazilian freshwater lakes and has recently been developing modelling approaches for aquaculture zonation, site selection and carrying capacity assessment. This work links nicely with the Scottish freshwater lake case study where the team at Stirling are also evaluating and developing approaches and models to assess carrying capacity. During the visit, Flavia presented the results of the project she coordinates “Development of a new approach to calculate the carrying capacity for freshwater reservoirs to support sustainable fish production” and Akpo Ekpeki, PhD student from the University of Stirling, also presented his initial results so far for the Scottish freshwater lake case study. The meeting was extremely useful and there were lots of discussions regarding the approaches used for carrying capacity assessment and sustainable development of aquaculture as well as the regulatory context for freshwater aquaculture in Scotland and Brazil.
