Advancing global ecological modelling capabilities to simulate future trajectories of change in marine ecosystems

Our new paper regarding global marine ecosystem modelling is out in Frontiers in Marine Science

Check it out here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2020.567877/abstract

In this study, we present a global ecosystem modelling complex, EcoOcean v2, and use it to simulate past and future scenarios of marine ecosystem change, where we quantify the impacts of alternative configurations of the ecological model, responses to alternative climate-change scenarios, and the additional impacts of fishing. Our results show how future ecological trajectories are sensitive to alternative configurations of EcoOcean, highlighting the importance of model structural uncertainty in marine ecosystem models. Our results also show important changes in marine organism biomass distributions and in ecosystem structure under various scenarios of climate change. Ecological trajectories are sensitive to environmental drivers from alternative ESM outputs and RCPs, they show spatial variability and more severe changes when IPSL model and RCP 8.5 scenario are used. Under a non-fishing configuration, larger organisms show decreasing trends, while smaller organisms show mixed or increasing results. Fishing intensifies the negative effects predicted by climate change, which results in stronger biomass declines for species already losing under climate change, or dampened positive impacts for those increasing. Several species groups that win under climate change become losers under combined impacts, while only a few (small benthopelagic fish and cephalopods) species are projected to show positive biomass changes under cumulative impacts.