Understanding how ecosystem change influences fishery resources through trophic pathways is a key tenet of ecosystem‐based fishery management. System models (SM), which use numerical modeling to describe physical and biological processes, can advance inclusion of ecosystem and prey information in fisheries management; however, incorporating SMs in management requires evaluation against empirical data. The Bering Ecosystem Study Nutrient‐Phytoplankton‐Zooplankton (BESTNPZ) model is an SM (originally created by the Bering Ecosystem Study, which initiated in 2006 and was expanded by Kearney et al.) includes zooplankton biomass hindcasts for the Bering Sea. In the Bering Sea, zooplankton are an important prey item for fishery species, yet the zooplankton component of this SM has not been validated against empirical data. We compared empirical zooplankton data to BESTNPZ hindcast estimates for three zooplankton functional groups and found that the two sources of information are on different absolute scales. We found high correlation between relative seasonal biomass trends estimated by BESTNPZ and empirical data for large off‐shelf copepods (Neocalanus spp.) and low correlations for large on‐shelf copepods and small copepods (Calanus spp. and Pseudocalanus spp., respectively). To address these discrepancies, we constructed hybrid species distribution models (H‐SDM), which predict zooplankton biomass using the BESTNPZ hindcast and environmental covariates. We found that H‐SDMs offered marginal improvements over correlative species distribution models (C‐SDMs) relying solely on empirical data for spatial extrapolation and little improvement for most functional groups when forecasting short‐term temporal zooplankton biomass trends. Overall, we suggest that interpretation of current BESTNPZ hindcasts should be tempered by our understanding of key mismatches in absolute scale, seasonality, and annual indices between BESTNPZ and empirical data.
