Designing Floating Reef Habitats for Coastal Aquaculture: A Data-Driven Approach to Balancing Structural Stability and Marine Biodiversity
Keywords:
floating artificial reefs; coastal aquaculture; structural reliability; habitat complexity; surrogate modeling; multi-objective optimizationAbstract
Floating reef habitats offer a means of adding structural complexity and ecological function to coastal aquaculture systems without occupying additional benthic area, but their design is constrained by coupled hydrodynamic, mooring, material, and ecological requirements. Existing artificial-reef practice tends to treat structural safety and biodiversity enhancement as separate problems, which can produce overly conservative modules with limited habitat value or ecologically elaborate modules with unacceptable loading and maintenance burdens. This manuscript develops a data-driven design framework for floating reef habitats in coastal aquaculture that formalizes the design problem as a reliability-constrained, multi-objective optimization under uncertainty. The framework represents each module through a design vector covering displaced volume, projected area, mooring geometry, module spacing, habitat complexity, substrate rugosity, and siting. Structural performance is described through wave loading, buoyancy equilibrium, mooring tension, and fatigue-related reliability constraints, while biodiversity performance is represented as an expected, taxa-weighted function of habitat complexity, substrate condition, spacing, and connectivity. Bayesian surrogate models and global sensitivity analysis are used to link sparse field, laboratory, and numerical information to design objectives, and a Pareto-based search identifies non-dominated designs rather than a single nominal optimum. The central insight is that biodiversity gains from added complexity are not separable from drag, buoyancy, and mooring penalties; therefore, effective floating reef design must negotiate these trade-offs explicitly and update them as monitoring data accumulate. The framework provides a technically defensible basis for designing modular floating habitats that are both safer to moor and more ecologically purposeful in aquaculture settings.
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This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
