Uniting to Sustain Ocean Ecosystems – Aker Biomarine

Background

Aker Biomarine is a leading supplier of krill-derived products for the consumer health, wellness, and animal nutrition markets. As a biotech innovator, the company emphasizes the sustainable harvest of krill, operating within fully traceable supply chains. Aker Biomarine was the first krill company to earn Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification, reflecting its commitment to both human and planetary health.

Use Case – Aker Biomarine, HUB Ocean and the Institute for Marine Research as partners

Antarctic krill is an integral species in the Southern Ocean, fueling a web of marine life and driving biogeochemical cycles in the Southern Ocean. Beyond environmental benefits, krill is also rich in Omega-3 fatty acids sought for supplements and aquaculture feeds. Krill is thus harvested by the fishing industry. Aker Biomarine, recognized the value of opening their data to enable a 3-way partnership with regulators, scientists to foster sustainability and best practices. To manage the complexities and maximize the value of this data, Aker Biomarine partnered with HUB Ocean through the Ocean Data Platform. This collaboration has revolutionized data processing and analysis, providing rapid and detailed insights into krill swarms and their environmental dynamics.

Types of Shared Data

Aker BioMarine’s fishing vessels, equipped with echosounder devices, shared 10 years’ worth of:

• Acoustic krill data.

How the data is made publicly available

The data is made available on HUB Ocean’s Ocean Data Platform where HUB Ocean transformed the data according to the FAIR standard and scientific users were approached.

Further Value and Impact Creation  

Company benefits: For Aker Biomarine, sharing data demonstrates its commitment as a pioneer in sustainable practices and transparency. Sharing this data openly with regulators and scientists allows for a transparent, data-driven approach to appropriately regulating catch of this precious species. Further, they benefit from enhanced and transformed datasets that enable them to run their catch operations more effectively.

Science benefits: The acoustic data helps scientists to see the krill swarms, their distribution patterns, migration patterns dynamics and even predator’s behavior. Combining with other data that describe physical and chemical properties of seawater in the area, scientists study how climate change alters the ecosystem's health. The processed data will further be used for other exciting studies of the ecosystem in the Southern Ocean. Researchers will look at the feeding behavior of marine mammals and penguins in the area and construct an ecosystem model to predict future dependencies of ecosystem elements and climate change..