Oceans and Fisheries Seminars

Driven by public awareness about climate change, increases in computing power, and dramatic increases in availability of big data, there are now many scientific efforts trying to assess how global warming and anthropogenic activities may impact the biophysical environment, biodiversity, marine resources, and the socio-ecological marine systems at regional and global scales. Marta will present EcoOcean, a spatial-temporal ecosystem modelling complex of the global ocean that spans marine food webs from primary producers to top predators, and includes worldwide fisheries and climate dynamics. EcoOcean reproduces spatial-temporal ecosystem dynamics by linking species productivity, distributions, and tropic interactions under changing environmental conditions. Under the global model inter-comparison initiative Fish-MIP, EcoOcean has been used to simulate past and future scenarios of climate change and fisheries, considering alternative input drivers using standardized outputs from Earth System Models and contrasting RCP emission scenarios for historical and future periods. Marta will present recent innovations in the EcoOcean modelling complex, which, among others, include spatial variation in temperature-driven productivity, a high-resolution species breakdown of internal functional groups, and the ability to incorporate and predict species native ranges to bridge the gap between statistical and mechanistic modelling. EcoOcean sets a baseline to further develop global ocean analyses and to contribute to the quantification of cumulative effects assessment of multiple stressors and plausible ocean-based solutions to global change.