We held a workshop on 14-16 June 2005 to review strategies for shipboard evaluation of BWT systems. The overall objective of the workshop was to develop consensus recommendations and general guidelines for a standardized approach to shipboard evaluation, including groundwork leading up to full-scale testing.
Workshop participants were selected to include experts in many areas of ballast water research, toxicology, experimental design, ship operations, and biology/ecology of particular groups of organisms, including bacteria, protists, and zooplankton. Participants included mostly research scientists who were familiar and actively involved in the ballast water issue. Most participants were from the United States, but the workshop also included experts from Canada, Japan, Singapore, and UK.
The workshop was not a venue to examine or discuss specific technologies. Speakers were not invited to present technology-specific information or input. Our intent was to be technology-neutral in considering standard approaches to evaluating the performance of BWTs aboard ships. This report provides a synthesis of information from the workshop presentations and discussions, exploring many key issues in testing BWT.
Although the primary focus of the workshop was intended to be shipboard testing, the role of scale and when to conduct shipboard tests was a central theme. Thus, the output of this workshop includes explicit consideration of both scale and experimental approach, in establishing general guidelines for treatment testing.