Refining approaches to measuring, monitoring and appraising animal welfare in aquaculture research is key to (i) protecting and optimizing it, (ii) documenting the severity of how and when it deviates, and (iii) ensuring good scientific quality, reliable results and reproducibility, amongst other factors. However, different fish species and life stages can have varying welfare needs and assessing their welfare can be challengi...

Injuries from lice treatments are ranked as a major cause of mortality and poor welfare for Atlantic salmon in marine net pens. As a result, scoring schemes based on the external appearance of injuries and severity are now frequently used. One such recently developed scheme for farmed salmon is the LAKSVEL protocol, inspired by previous schemes such as the SWIM models and the FISHWELL scoring system. Here we review the injury‐...

A semantic model for overall welfare assessment of Atlantic salmon reared in sea cages is presented. The model, called SWIM 1.0, is designed to enable fish farmers to make a formal and standardized assessment of fish welfare using a set of selected welfare indicators. In order to cover all welfare relevant aspects from the animals’ point of view and to create a science‐based tool we first identified the known welfare needs of...