Aquarius 2.0 Shellfish Sanitation Software Out

May 14th, 2009

Aquarius 2.0 Shellfish Sanitation Simulator and Analytical Software Released (POSTED 05-08-09)

In 2004, Aquarius version 1.0 was presented at the Pacific Rim Shellfish Sanitation Conference in San Francisco. During and following the conference, discussions were held with State and Federal health  service agencies that resulted in a 12 point  “wish list” of improvements to the software so that it could be used as a more refined and accurate assessment tool by the regulatory agencies and industry.

In 2005, the Western Regional Aquaculture Center provided a research grant to complete a multi-year, cooperative effort with state and federal shellfish regulatory agencies to construct a version 2.0 of the Aquarius software. Version 2.0 was completed in late November 2008. The 12 additions to the program were completed, in addition to two additional statistical modules to determine Type II error, Non-parametric testing and two modules to determine adequate sample size. Version 2.0 has been beta-tested by personnel of the California Department of Public Health, Shellfish Sanitation Program, and is now fully operational.

Aquarius v. 2.0 is written in the Visual FoxPro programming language and runs under the Windows operating system. The software consists of three components. The first is the input interface, which consists of rainfall (hourly precipitation over numerous years), fecal coliform samples (three- or five-tube samples), region and closure rules (primary and secondary rules), and dialog boxes by which the user enters all the input data. The second component is the simulation engine, which applies the hypothetical closure rules to the actual rainfall data and actual fecal coliform sampling data, and performs a parametric analysis of the data. The third component is the output interface, which consists of a series of statistical reports that are generated from the output of the simulation engine.

During the creation of Aquarius, two major concepts were revealed. The first was the application of T-test statistics to determine if there were any statistically significant differences between an existing rainfall closure rule and a new hypothetical rule. The second was the identification of the critical period in which water samples must be taken and coliform analysis run to determine if there are significant statistical differences between the existing rule and the hypothetical new rule.

Michael in News

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