The increasing spread of marine non-indigenous species (NIS) due to the growth in global shipping traffic is causing widespread concern for the ecological and economic impacts of marine bioinvasions. Risk management authorities need tools to identify pathways and source regions of priority concern in order to better target efforts for preventing NIS introduction. The probability of a successful NIS introduction is affected by the probability that a marine species entrained in a transport vector will survive the voyage between origin and destination locations, and establish an independently reproducing population at the destination. Three important risk factors are voyage duration, range of environmental conditions encountered during transit, and environmental similarity between origin and destination. In this study, we aimed for a globally comprehensive approach of assembling quantifications of source-destination risk factors from every potential origin to every potential destination. To derive estimates of voyage-related marine biosecurity risk, we used computer-simulated vessel paths between pairs of ecoprovinces in the Marine Ecoregions Of the World biogeographic classification system. We used the physical length of each path to calculate voyage duration risk, and the cross-latitudinal extent of the path to calculate voyage path risk. Environmental similarity risk was based on comparing annual average sea surface temperature and salinity within each ecoprovince to those of other ecoprovinces. We derived three separate sets of risk quantifications, one each for voyage duration, voyage path, and environmental similarity. Our quantifications can be applied to studies that require source-destination risk estimates. They can be used separately or combined, depending on the importance of the types of source-destination risks that might be relevant to particular scientific or risk management questions or applications.

The Scientific Paper of the Future (SPF) concept, initiated by the EarthCube OntoSoft Funded Project, encourages scientists to publish not only peer-reviewed journal articles, but also all associated data, software (data processing scripts), and computational workflows, in order to enable full science reproducibility. While the SPF concept was originally aimed at geoscientists, it can also be applied to interdisciplinary projects such as between ecology, economics, and maritime shipping. Multi-region input-output (MRIO) analysis is a method from economics for analyzing economic interdependencies between different regional entities. Entities can be countries, regions within a country, or groups of countries. MRIO can also be used to analyze other types of interdependencies, such as the environmental impact of one region’s activities on another. For this project, we use MRIO to analyze the global spread of marine non-indigenous species via cargo ships. Over 90% of global trade occurs by maritime shipping. Along with intended cargo, ships provide a means for marine organisms to move to locations beyond their natural ranges, mainly via hull fouling or in ballast tanks. These species can have harmful ecological and economic impacts at their destinations. By using MRIO to follow the imports and exports of commodities between countries, we can deduce the magnitude of seaborne trade connections based on physical volume of commodity traded, and therefore the magnitude and geographic distribution of marine biosecurity risk. MRIO model construction involved incorporating a diversity of data types from ecology, economics, and shipping, and has turned out to be a surprisingly complex endeavor. My poster will demonstrate the principles of an SPF by providing a diagram of the computational workflow involved in the model’s construction, including an explanation for each dataset incorporated into the model’s input parameters and each piece of software written to process the data and assemble and run the model.