Global Ecological Modelling to Simulate Future Trajectories of Change in Marine Ecosystems

8th edition of the Ramon Margalef Colloquia: Past, present and future of a living ocean, September 2022There has been considerable effort to predict the impact of climate change and anthropogenic activities on the biophysical environment, biodiversity, and marine resources at regional and global scales. To further our understanding of how changes in the environment and marine resources will affect marine ecosystems, there is a need for advancing global integrated assessments. I will introduce the recent efforts to model the global ocean using marine ecosystem models (MEMs) and, specifically, I will present a spatial-temporal ecosystem model of the global ocean (EcoOcean), spanning food web dynamics from primary producers to top predators, and including worldwide fisheries. EcoOcean reproduces spatial-temporal ecosystem dynamics by linking species productivity and distribution to main environmental conditions in flux under climate change (e.g. primary production, sea temperature, salinity), accounting for varying species compositions of functional groups over time. The modelling platform is used to simulate past and future scenarios of climate change and fisheries, considering the uncertainty of internal ecological hypotheses and alternative input drivers using standardized outputs from Earth-System Models (ESMs) and contrasting emission scenarios (RCPs) for historical and future periods. Standardized ecological indicators are used to compare changes in marine structure and functioning among scenarios. These efforts set a baseline to further develop global ocean analyses and contribute to the quantification of cumulative effects assessment of multiple stressors and plausible ocean-based solutions to global change, considering species, biodiversity and food-web spatial-temporal dynamicsPeer reviewe