Project Sea Dragon is a large-scale, integrated, land-based prawn aquaculture project in northern Australia designed to produce high-quality, year-round reliable volumes for export markets and will ultimately be one of the largest prawn farming operations in Australia, if not the world. Project Sea Dragon will be a staged development of up to 10,000 hectares of production ponds, including the development of a series of facilities across northern Australia.

Water Technology’s roles in the Project Sea Dragon EIS project included significant field and data collection work in the waters around Darwin and Legune Station. Field work has included mobilisation, deployment and retrieval of monitoring instruments and the subsequent analysis of oceanographic, hydrologic, meteorological and sediment data. Bathymetric survey and ADCP current data has been both collected by Water Technology and Project Managed by Water Technology for a number of the project locations.

The isolated and remote location of the project sites required Water Technology staff to be innovative and adaptable to a range of conditions to ensure data was collected. The suite of data collected for the project provided a robust set of data which was used for model calibration and to provide additional information to the environmental characteristics of the site.