Harvest planning under uncertainty for ocean-based salmon aquaculture

• Operational harvest planning under uncertainty for ocean-based salmon aquaculture. • Explicit account of biological, operational and market uncertainty. • Multistage stochastic programming with scenario trees and out-of-sample validation. • Cases from Norwegian salmon aquaculture show a considerable impact of uncertainty. We address harvest planning for ocean-based salmon aquaculture, considering biological, operational and market uncertainty using multistage stochastic programming. The model is applied to Norwegian salmon aquaculture, and we find that decision support tools provide valuable insights across numerous situations in a complex environment. Our results demonstrate that actively incorporating uncertainty into harvest planning yields considerable value.