Food-Web Modeling in the Maritime Spatial Planning Challenge Simulation Platform: Results from the Baltic Sea Region

Exploring multiple stressor effects with Ecopath, Ecosim, and Ecospace: Research designs, modeling techniques, and future directions

“…Research designs different from the four categories above were presented in 5% of articles. These included, e.g., descriptions of a serious gaming platform where Ecospace provides ecosystem responses to human activities in a marine spatial planning game (Goncalves et al, 2021;Steenbeek et al, 2020) and simulations of contaminant accumulation in the food web without consideration of specific scenarios (e.g., Tierney et al, 2018).…”

Exploring multiple stressor effects with Ecopath, Ecosim, and Ecospace: Research designs, modeling techniques, and future directions

“…Alva-Basurto and Arias-González, 2014; Capitani et al, 2021a;Dahood et al, 2020Dahood et al, , 2019de Mutsert et al, 2021;Espinosa-Romero et al, 2011;Fretzer, 2015;Frisk et al, 2011;Goncalves et al, 2021 Bauer et al, 2019Bauer et al, , 2018Beecham et al, 2015;Costalago et al, 2019;Daskalov, 2002;de Mutsert et al, 2016;Ehrnsten et al, 2019;Hansson et al, 2007;Hyytiäinen et al, 2021;Kao et al, 2014;Libralato et al, 2015;Ma et al, 2010;Niiranen et al, 2013;Okey et al, 2004;Österblom et al, 2007;Sakamoto and Shirakihara, 2017;Uusitalo et al, 2022;Wang et al, 2021;Zhu et al, 2020 • Forcing functions for primary production or producer biomass (e.g., based on satellite data or biogeochemical models) • Shading of benthic vegetation as forced mortality (fishing) • Deoxygenation as forcing functions, e.g., modifying fish egg production based on water volumes with oxygen levels above a recruitment threshold…”

“…If response functions could not be determined empirically, some researchers explored hypothetical alternatives and selected the functions based on model fit to historical data if available (Lewis et al, 2016;Plummer et al, 2013). Finally, habitat changes have recently been modeled among a broad set of other human activities and stressors via environmental response functions in simplified Ecospace models (Goncalves et al, 2021;Steenbeek et al, 2020; see Section 6.4).…”

“…Four studies described Ecospace models incorporating underwater noise by means of environmental response functions relating shipping intensity and distance to acoustic deterrent devices to estimates of lost foraging time (Goncalves et al, 2021;Harvey, 2018;Steenbeek et al, 2020). Ofir et al (2017) explored the effects of lake biomanipulation (restocking of some species via forcing juvenile biomasses and targeted removal of others via fishing).…”

“…Ecospace is a technical foundation of the "MSP Challenge", a serious game about marine spatial planning in which players negotiate and draw spatial plans for a wide range of human activities and receive maps of the resulting biomass distributions, fisheries catch and effort, and biodiversity (Goncalves et al, 2021;Santos et al, 2020;Steenbeek et al, 2020). For this purpose, 16 human activities were combined into maps of four pressures (noise, pelagic physical disturbance and pollution, seabed physical disturbance and pollution, and artificial substrate) using external software, and included as environmental drivers in Ecospace.…”