An Integrated Global-to-Regional Scale Workflow for Simulating Climate
Change Impacts on Marine Ecosystems
Abstract
As the urgency to evaluate the impacts of climate change on marine
ecosystems increases, there is a need to develop robust projections and
improve the uptake of ecosystem model outputs in policy and planning.
Standardising input and output data is a crucial step in evaluating and
communicating results, but can be challenging when using models with
diverse structures, assumptions, and outputs that address
region-specific issues. We developed an implementation framework and
workflow to standardise the climate and fishing forcings used by
regional models contributing to the Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Model
Intercomparison Project (FishMIP) and to facilitate comparative analyses
across models and a wide range of regions, in line with the FishMIP 3a
protocol. We applied our workflow to three case study areas-models: the
Baltic Sea Mizer, Hawai’i-based Longline fisheries therMizer, and the
southern Benguela ecosystem Atlantis marine ecosystem models. We then
selected the most challenging steps of the workflow and illustrated
their implementation in different model types and regions. Our workflow
is adaptable across a wide range of regional models, from non-spatially
explicit to spatially explicit and fully-depth resolved models and
models that include one or several fishing fleets. This workflow will
facilitate the development of regional marine ecosystem model ensembles
and enhance future research on marine ecosystem model development and
applications, model evaluation and benchmarking, and global-to-regional
model comparisons.