DOI: 10.7910/dvn/jkeg2b
title: Restoration of Decision Support Software for Aquaculture

description: 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. 
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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. 
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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.
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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.
description: When both the Oregon State University (USA) and Asian Institute of Technology (Thailand) servers hosting the Global Experiment Database (GED) lost the Central Data Base around the late-1990s to the mid-2000s, data were also lost for running POND©. While great attempts were made afterwards to reconstruct the data, and are presented here in this Dataset, all data were not found. At OSU, the server located in the then called Bioresource Engineering department experienced a loss after a server upgrade. After years of low activity on global database access, and changes in personnel, the database was no longer accessible. At the shadow site, hosted by the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand, a similar fate befell the GED and files loaded for running POND©. Though the original creators of the software were contacted for physical media, these media were not found. Instead, all physical media that the Lead Principal Investigator had retained after five major campus office moves were located and accessed, ranging from Zip to SyQuest to old floppy disks. Again, no relevant Global Experiment files were found on the decades-old physical media. A painstaking search of millions of lines of directory files eventually yielded data that were then accessed, converted, translated, and curated for this Dataset. The reconstruction of these files by Hillary Egna, Shawn Hayward, and Cole Ensminger took years, on-and-off from 2012 to 2020, and it remains unclear if all data were captured for each site and cycle. The most reliable data for each site are therefore presented in “hard copy” format in the accompanying dataset called Data Reports. The recovered files are presented as .csv files uploaded in the accompanying Central Data Base dataset and are useful insofar as they are complete, digital, and manipulable. Data Formatting procedures and instructions can be found in the Database Data Submission Manual referenced in this dataset, and on the archived CRSP website. Additional information may be found in the old help file from 1995, which was translated from .hlp to a .chm file and uploaded into this dataset (also uploaded as a .pdf file). The recovered files are windows executable. It is unknown which original software was used, though it may have been Stella, and then Microsoft Access.
description: The original software was a product under the former Pond Dynamics/Aquaculture Collaborative Research Support Program (PD/A CRSP) and may be cited thusly if extracted from the archived website and older publications. The recovered and restored dataset presented in this dataverse was a product under the former AquaFish Innovation Lab (AquaFish IL) and under Oregon State University and may be cited thusly. Dr. Hillary Egna was Lead Principal Investigator during both grants and time periods. Original data managers and collectors names are credited under contributors. Authors for this dataset are those who devoted much effort and time to recovering data, recreating historical files, translating and restoring data, and making data accessible in this dataverse.