The ensemble kalman filter for multidimensional bioeconomic models

To serve the needs for integrating economic considerations into management decisions in ecosystem frameworks, we need to build models that capture observed system dynamics and incorporate existing knowledge of ecosystems while at the same time serve the needs of economics analysis. The main constraint for models to serve in economic analysis is dimensionality. In addition, models should be stable in order to apply in long-term management analysis. We use the ensemble Kalman filter to fit relatively simple models to ecosystem or foodweb data and estimate parameters that are stable over the observed variability in the data. The filter also provides a lower bound on the noise terms that a stochastic analysis require. In the present article, we apply the filter to model the main interactions in the Barents Sea ecosystem