It is with great pleasure that the Aquatic Gardeners Association announces the results of the 2015 International Aquascaping Contest. As in years past, the contest had excellent participation with almost 500 outstanding aquascapes and participants from all over the world. Again for this year, there were record numbers of aquascapes in the smaller categories and some outstanding biotope and paludarium layouts. We also had another excellent showing for the Dutch category with some beautiful examples of Dutch layouts.
The Aquatic Gardeners Association would like to thank our esteemed panel of judges. Without their willingness to take time from their busy schedules and judge, our Aquascaping contest would not be the success it is today. For this year, we have the AGA’s own Karen Randall, Luca Galarraga From Aquabase Brazil, Long Tran Hoang from Vietnam, and Juan Puchades Rufino from Spain. We were also fortunate to have Marco Aukes judge our Dutch category and we hope to continue to grow our Dutch categories again. Phil Edwards assisted with the Biotope category. Thank you judges for your efforts; they are truly appreciated by our contestants and the AGA.
Our contest would not be the success it is without our contest sponsors. We had some outstanding companies support this year's contest including Seachem, Aqvainnova, Build My Led, Aqua Forest Aquarium, Florida Aquatic Nurseries, Amazonas, The Wet Spot Tropical Fish, American Marine Inc., and Finnex. Their support is greatly appreciated and ensures the continued success of our contest!
Finally, I would like to thank ... Evan Wright for providing this year’s contest graphics. And a huge thank you to Erik Olson our tech guru, who does all the behind the scenes work to ensure that the contest runs smoothly.
So, without further ado, enjoy this year's aquascapes!
Bailin Shaw
AGA Contest Chair
A word from the technical director: Every year we get requests to show "overall ranking" of the aquascapes (like IAPLC does), questions about the order in which the aquascapes are listed, and speculations that the presentation order secretly represents the "overall rankings". I would like to make it clear that if we wanted to show all the rankings from #1 down to the bottom, we would explicitly list them! Instead, we feel that, at best, only the top three are accurately ranked by the judging. We added the top ten to show a general idea of what the judges liked, but within the top ten, the absolute ranking is not accurate. So the aquascapes are ordered by award type, and then by volume (smallest to largest). So in each category, you will see 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place, then any honorable mentions (ordered by volume), the remaining top ten (also ordered by volume), the unawarded aquascapes (also ordered by volume), and finally the disqualified entries (ordered by volume as well). -- Erik
