Restoration of Decision Support Software for Aquaculture

This Dataset presents the restoration of POND©, which was decision support software for aquaculture originally created under the Aquaculture Collaborative Research Support Program in the early 1990s, but lost after years of system and server changes. The restoration involved the tedious yet careful recovery of corrupted files and their translation into viable formats for public usage. POND© software is a decision support system that uses powerful analytical tools to rapidly assess the individual pond- or facility-level performance of aquaculture systems under different management regimes. Aquaculturists, researchers, extension agents, educators, producers, farmers, and students can use POND© to explore planning and management options along with the biological, chemical, physical, and economic issues relevant to the optimization of pond production. For example, users can conduct multiple simulations to examine the effects of management scenarios, including: varied stocking densities and combinations of species: specific stocking and harvest dates of individual populations: feed and fertilization schedules: and water balance and flow through pond facilities. POND© software analyzes pond systems through hierarchically organized simulation models and progressively more complex models. POND© contains an economics package for generating pond facility enterprise budgets. It also includes a parameter estimation package which can compare multiple simulation runs with user-provided fish growth data, arriving at “best-fit” parameters to customize the software to specific culture conditions, sites, and species. Additionally, the software features highly configurable, user-friendly interfaces to: define new ponds and new populations associated with specific ponds: generate fertilization recommendations and feed schedules to more efficiently attain specified fish target weights; estimate lime requirements; conduct facility-level simulations at a given site; and present simulation results in graphical and tabular formats. The software may be functional if run on Windows XP with no guarantee of success on Windows systems newer than XP, and also no guarantee with the use of emulators such as Wine on MacOS or Linux, or other possible solutions to run the program. In one test case the software ran and executed successfully via Windows XP installed on a virtual machine using Oracle VM VirtualBox. There are 38 files in this dataset. To run the software, open the POND.exe file. The .db files are Microsoft Access database files. The POND.exe file reads the .db files. For additional assistance on how to properly use the software please see the software documentation in the POND.chm or POND.pdf file.