Joe Buszowski

Representing Variable Habitat Quality in a Spatial Food Web Model

Why are marine species where they are? The scientific community is faced with an urgent need to understand aquatic ecosystem dynamics in the context of global change. This requires development of scientific tools with the capability to predict how biodiversity, natural resources, and ecosystem services will change in response to stressors such as climate change and further expansion of fishing. Species distribution models and ecosystem models are two methodologies that are being developed to further this understanding. To date, these methodologies offer limited capabilities to work jointly to produce integrated assessments that take both food web dynamics and spatial-temporal environmental variability into account. We here present a new habitat capacity model as an implementation of the spatial-temporal model Ecospace of the Ecopath with Ecosim approach. The new model offers the ability to drive foraging capacity of species from the cumulative impacts of multiple physical, oceanographic, and environmental factors such as depth, bottom type, temperature, salinity, oxygen concentrations, and so on. We use a simulation modeling procedure to evaluate sampling characteristics of the new habitat capacity model. This development bridges the gap between envelope environmental models and classic ecosystem food web models, progressing toward the ability to predict changes in marine ecosystems under scenarios of global change and explicitly taking food web direct and indirect interactions into account.

Historical changes of the Mediterranean Sea ecosystem: modelling the role and impact of primary productivity and fisheries changes over time

The Mediterranean Sea has been defined “under siege” because of intense pressures from multiple human activities; yet there is still insufficient information on the cumulative impact of these stressors on the ecosystem and its resources. We evaluate how the historical (1950–2011) trends of various ecosystems groups/species have been impacted by changes in primary productivity (PP) combined with fishing pressure. We investigate the whole Mediterranean Sea using a food web modelling approach. Results indicate that both changes in PP and fishing pressure played an important role in driving species dynamics. Yet, PP was the strongest driver upon the Mediterranean Sea ecosystem. This highlights the importance of bottom-up processes in controlling the biological characteristics of the region. We observe a reduction in abundance of important fish species (~34%, including commercial and non-commercial) and top predators (~41%), and increases of the organisms at the bottom of the food web (~23%). Ecological indicators, such as community biomass, trophic levels, catch and diversity indicators, reflect such changes and show overall ecosystem degradation over time. Since climate change and fishing pressure are expected to intensify in the Mediterranean Sea, this study constitutes a baseline reference for stepping forward in assessing the future management of the basin.