Aquatic foods are a vital source of nutrition, yet growing demand and stagnant wild‐capture fisheries have positioned aquaculture as essential to meeting global food needs. Despite this, aquaculture's diverse forms remain poorly understood, particularly small‐scale aquaculture (SSA). Unlike small‐scale fisheries (SSF), which are widely recognized in policy and research, SSA lacks consistent definitions and is often conflated w...

Aquaculture is expected to expand significantly in the coming decades to meet growing demand. A key variable for understanding the potential benefit of and impact from this growth is efficiency; yet a comprehensive assessment of on‐farm area use and yield is limited. Much like land‐based agriculture, range and variation in yields across space, species, and practice provide insights into area use and production efficiencies. Cu...

Aquaculture (freshwater and marine) has largely supplemented fisheries, but in theory could help reduce fishing pressure on wild stocks. Although not the sole factors, some potential benefits depend on aquaculture pressures on fished species, including collection of wild ‘seed’ material—earlier to later life stages—for rearing in captivity and the capacity of aquaculture to increase. Here we first classify 203 marine (saltwate...

Temperate oyster and tropical coral reefs are analogous systems that create habitat for economically, ecologically, and culturally important species, and they provide countless ecosystem services to human coastal communities. Globally, reefs are imperiled by multiple anthropogenic stressors, particularly climate impacts. Using aquaculture to support conservation goals - known as conservation aquaculture - is a relatively new a...

Climate change is altering the productivity of marine fisheries and challenging the effectiveness of historical fisheries management. Harvest control rules, which describe the process for determining catch limits in fisheries, represent one pathway for promoting climate resilience. In the USA, flexibility in how regional management councils specify harvest control rules has spawned diverse approaches for reducing catch limits...

Aquaculture is the fastest growing form of food production across the globe. The expansion of the industry has brought about a diversity of approaches to mitigate social and ecological impacts associated with aquaculture production systems. At the same time, there is a growing interest in utilizing aquaculture for conservation purposes including species recovery, habitat restoration and offsetting the impacts of wild capture o...

Marine aquaculture (mariculture) plays a relatively small role in the United States’ domestic seafood production, despite considerable scope for industry development and high volumes of imported farmed seafood resulting in a significant trade deficit. Currently, most mariculture in the United States occurs in nearshore waters or land‐based tanks and is regulated and guided using state‐level policy, with a relative absence of n...

The capacity for aquaculture to provide an alternative source of fish and seafood to capture fisheries was once promoted as a tool to reduce demand for wild fish and thus tackle overfishing. To date, there is little evidence to suggest that aquaculture growth has successfully reduced fishing effort on wild populations. Recent theory on “blue transitions” suggests that displacement may only occur as aquaculture production surpa...

Aquaculture policy often promotes production of low‐trophic level species for sustainable industry growth. Yet, the application of the trophic level concept to aquaculture is complex, and its value for assessing sustainability is further complicated by continual reformulation of feeds. The majority of fed farmed fish and invertebrate species are produced using human‐made compound feeds that can differ markedly from the diet of...

Cell‐based seafood is an emerging novel food, with many start‐up companies aspiring for ocean conservation benefits through expanded market share that displaces wild‐caught seafood. However, the ability for cell‐based seafood to achieve this conservation outcome is often oversimplified and will rely on an extensive, and we find somewhat tenuous, chain of events. Here, we outline the technological, behavioural, market and ecolo...

Effective management of aquatic resources, wild and farmed, has implications for the livelihoods of dependent communities, food security, and ecosystem health. Good management requires information on the status of harvested species, yet many gaps remain in our understanding of these species and systems, in particular the lack of taxonomic resolution of harvested species. To assess these gaps we compared the occurrence of lande...

The American sand lance ( Ammodytes americanus , Ammodytidae) and the Northern sand lance ( A. dubius , Ammodytidae) are small forage fishes that play an important functional role in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean (NWA). The NWA is a highly dynamic ecosystem currently facing increased risks from climate change, fishing and energy development. We need a better understanding of the biology, population dynamics and ecosystem role o...

Aim To examine the way in which ‘area’ and ‘habitat diversity’ interact in shaping species richness and to find a simple and valid way to express this interaction. Location The Natura 2000 network of terrestrial protected areas in Greece, covering approximately 16% of the national territory. Methods We used the Natura 2000 framework, which provides a classification scheme for natural habitat types, to quantify habitat heteroge...