Abstract
Ecosystem-based management requires understanding of food webs. Consequently, assessment of food web status is mandatory according to the European Union’s Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) for EU Member States. However, how to best monitor and assess food webs in practise has proven a challenging question. Here, we review and assess the current status of food web indicators and food web models, and discuss whether the models can help addressing current shortcomings of indicator-based food web assessments, using the Baltic Sea as an example region. We show that although the MSFD food web assessment was designed to use food web indicators alone, they are currently poorly fit for the purpose, because they lack interconnectivity of trophic guilds. We then argue that the multiple food web models published for this region have a high potential to provide additional coherence to the definition of good environmental status, the evaluation of uncertainties, and estimates for unsampled indicator values, but we also identify current limitations that stand in the way of more formal implementation of this approach. We close with a discussion of which current models have the best capacity for this purpose in the Baltic Sea, and of the way forward towards the combination of measurable indicators and modelling approaches in food web assessments.
Highlights
With increasing human use of the marine environment, an ecosystem-based approach to management of human activities is widely acknowledged as the fundamental principle to accomplish sustainable resource use and maintain healthy marine ecosystems (Pikitch et al 2004; McLeod and Leslie 2009)
We provide a comprehensive review and a gap analysis of the food web indicators developed for the Baltic Sea, which serves as a good example of a marine area with a well-established and long-running monitoring regime and is one of the most data-dense regions in the world
The search was concluded with a total of 64 hits and, after removing four clear overlaps, we identified 60 food web-related indicators with different application areas in the Baltic Sea
Summary
With increasing human use of the marine environment, an ecosystem-based approach to management of human activities is widely acknowledged as the fundamental principle to accomplish sustainable resource use and maintain healthy marine ecosystems (Pikitch et al 2004; McLeod and Leslie 2009). The identified food web indicators have sufficient and relevant spatial coverage in the Baltic Sea (Table 2), but our analysis suggests that they only partly reflect changes that are caused by manageable pressures and their GES targets are not well defined (Table 3).
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