EUROPEAN AQUACULTURE SOCIETY

Their core work

The European Aquaculture Society is a professional association based in Oostende, Belgium, that serves as a knowledge broker and networking hub for the European aquaculture sector. They specialize in transferring research results to industry practitioners, organizing training and capacity-building activities, and facilitating international cooperation on sustainable aquaculture and marine resource management. Their role in EU projects centers on dissemination, knowledge exchange, and connecting scientific communities with policy and industry audiences across blue growth and food security domains.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Their early H2020 involvement (2015) centered on broad marine and maritime knowledge brokerage, with COLUMBUS focusing on monitoring, MSFD compliance, and blue growth knowledge transfer. By 2017, their focus shifted toward aquaculture-specific challenges — food security, international cooperation, capacity building, and food value chain analysis. This represents a narrowing from general marine knowledge management toward applied aquaculture sustainability and food systems.

EAS is moving from broad marine dissemination toward targeted aquaculture sustainability and international food security cooperation, suggesting future projects will emphasize applied aquaculture solutions with global reach.

How they like to work

EAS never coordinates H2020 projects — they join as a participant or third party, which is consistent with their role as a professional association providing dissemination and network access rather than leading research. With 56 unique partners across 20 countries from just 3 projects, they operate in large consortia and bring extensive reach. Their value to a consortium is access to the aquaculture professional community across Europe, not technical research capacity.

Despite only 3 projects, EAS has connected with 56 partners across 20 countries, reflecting the large consortium sizes typical of CSA and RIA projects in the food and marine sectors. Their network spans most of Europe, consistent with their pan-European membership base.

What sets them apart

EAS is the main professional association for aquaculture in Europe, giving them unmatched access to practitioners, researchers, and industry players across the sector. Unlike research institutes or universities, they bring a ready-made dissemination channel — their membership network — which makes them a natural partner for any project that needs to reach the aquaculture community. For consortium builders, EAS offers legitimacy, sector-wide visibility, and practical knowledge transfer infrastructure that individual research groups cannot provide.

Highlights from their portfolio

• COLUMBUS
  Focused on systematizing marine and maritime knowledge transfer across Europe, directly aligned with EAS's core mission as a knowledge broker for the blue economy.
• VALUMICS
  Largest EC contribution to EAS (EUR 80,162) and a four-year project analyzing food value chain dynamics — the most research-intensive project in their portfolio.