Abstract
Abstract. Societal and scientific challenges foster the implementation of the ecosystem approach to marine ecosystem analysis and management, which is a comprehensive means of integrating the direct and indirect effects of multiple stressors on the different components of ecosystems, from physical to chemical and biological and from viruses to fishes and marine mammals. Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) is a widely used software package, which offers capability for a dynamic description of the multiple interactions occurring within a food web, and, potentially, a crucial component of an integrated platform supporting the ecosystem approach. However, being written for the Microsoft .NET framework, seamless integration of this code with Fortran-based physical and/or biogeochemical oceanographic models is technically not straightforward. In this work we release a re-coding of EwE in Fortran (EwE-F). We believe that the availability of a Fortran version of EwE is an important step towards setting up coupled/integrated modelling schemes utilising this widely adopted software because it (i) increases portability of the EwE models and (ii) provides additional flexibility towards integrating EwE with Fortran-based modelling schemes. Furthermore, EwE-F might help modellers using the Fortran programming language to get close to the EwE approach. In the present work, first fundamentals of EwE-F are introduced, followed by validation of EwE-F against standard EwE utilising sample models. Afterwards, an end-to-end (E2E) ecological representation of the Gulf of Trieste (northern Adriatic Sea) ecosystem is presented as an example of online two-way coupling between an EwE-F food web model and a biogeochemical model. Finally, the possibilities that having EwE-F opens up are discussed.
Highlights
Oceanographic models, computationally intensive hydrodynamic and biogeochemical models, have mostly been written in Fortran (e.g. hydrodynamic models: NEMO (Madec, 2008), ROMS (Shchepetkin and McWilliams, 2005), POM (Blumberg and Mellor, 1980), MITGCM (Adcroft et al, 2004), MOM (Stock et al, 2014); and biogeochemical models: ERSEM (Blackford et al, 2004), BFM (Vichi et al, 2015), ERGOM (Neumann, 2000))
In order to assess the skill of Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE)-F with respect to EwE, two test case simulations, Generic 37 and Tampa Bay, which are distributed with the installation of the EwE software, were used
The residuals between the simulated biomass values of EwE in Fortran (EwE-F) and EwE ranged from 10−8 to 10−5, with the maximum difference found to be of the order of 10−5
Summary
Oceanographic models, computationally intensive hydrodynamic and biogeochemical models, have mostly been written in Fortran (e.g. hydrodynamic models: NEMO (Madec, 2008), ROMS (Shchepetkin and McWilliams, 2005), POM (Blumberg and Mellor, 1980), MITGCM (Adcroft et al, 2004), MOM (Stock et al, 2014); and biogeochemical models: ERSEM (Blackford et al, 2004), BFM (Vichi et al, 2015), ERGOM (Neumann, 2000)). Frequent revision of the Fortran standard and the addition of new capabilities to the language to meet changing demands enabled it to remain the de facto standard for writing computationally intensive scientific and engineering applications. Ecopath with Ecosim (hereinafter EwE) (Christensen and Walters, 2004; Christensen et al, 2005) is the most widely adopted tool for building models of marine and freshwater ecosystems, and possibly the first choice for analysis of food web dynamics. Available at www.ecopath.org, EwE has long been used for scientific studies related to fisheries, some aspects of aquaculture, marine ecology, climate and pollution. Ecopath.org) and more than 400 scientific publications utilising EwE as a modelling tool have been issued only in the last 2 decades There are thousands of users of the software worldwide (last record in 2008, 5649 reported users; www. ecopath.org) and more than 400 scientific publications utilising EwE as a modelling tool have been issued only in the last 2 decades
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