Chapter 1 Overview

  • StrathE2E2 is an R package for modelling the ‘big-picture’, whole ecosystem effects of hydrodynamics, temperature, nutrient additions, and fishing on continental shelf marine food webs.

  • StrathE2E2 has two linked parts - a fishing fleet model and an ecology model. The fishing model integrates harvesting, discarding and seabed disturbance rates across a range of gears and passes the results into the ecology model.

  • The ecology model is a network of coupled ordinary differential equations representing the rates of change in organic detritus, dissolved inorganic nutrient, and coarse guilds of living biomass spanning microbes to megafauna, in two coarse spatial compartments (inshore and offshore) and eight seabed habitats.

  • The equations which define the model include representations of feeding, metabolism, reproduction, active migrations, advection and mixing.

  • Environmental driving data include temperature, irradiance, hydrodynamics, and nutrient inputs from rivers, atmosphere and ocean boundaries.

  • The package includes functions for parameter optimization, global sensitivity analysis, and Monte Carlo estimation of credible intervals for model outputs.

  • In this one-hour course we aim to provide a hands-on introduction to using the package to run ecosystem models, write your own code to develop sceanrios and work with the model outputs.