Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 2 - BIGSEA (Biogeochemical and ecosystem interactions with socio-economic activity in the global ocean)
Teaser
The question of how global humanity can live better, while remaining within planetary boundaries, is one of the most important challenges of the 21st century. Elements of this challenge are being addressed by many thousands of researchers around the world, but these efforts...
Summary
The question of how global humanity can live better, while remaining within planetary boundaries, is one of the most important challenges of the 21st century. Elements of this challenge are being addressed by many thousands of researchers around the world, but these efforts are often isolated within disciplines, and there is no existing unification of natural science aspects with social aspects within a common quantitative framework. The BIGSEA project (www.earthsystemdynamics.org/iesd/bigsea) addresses this shortfall by aiming to develop a novel integrated, grid-based model framework that resolves both human and natural components, and to apply this to fundamental questions regarding interactions between climate, biogeochemistry, fishing and the marine ecosystem. This ambitious goal requires assembling a team with specific aspects of inter-discipilinary expertise, developing a new quantitative framework for simulating humans, identifying critical links of understanding, proposing new hypotheses and testing them against data.
Work performed
We have published the first global coupled marine fishery-ecosystem model and shown that continual improvements in fishing technology dominate all other factors in the long run. We discovered surprisingly strong relationships between features of the ocean environment and differences in the observed historical development of fisheries around the world, revealing a novel link between economic development and the ecosystem. We have also produced the first global description of seasonal fishing patterns in the global high seas using satellite data. We have developed a new model for simulating spatially-variable fishing fleets and dynamic management, including small-scale coastal fisheries and their interaction with industrial fleets. We are carrying out fieldwork to assess critical missing links in knowledge regarding the motivation and well-being of small-scale fisheries, which do not follow the same dynamics as industrial fisheries. We have produced a first global estimate of interactions between ocean biogeochemistry and all marine fish, and made a surprising discovery regarding the probable iron limitation of fish in parts of the open ocean. We are collecting an unprecedented global size-based organismal dataset for improved constraints on the entire marine ecosystem. Finally, inspired by the climate model simulation approach, we developed a novel method for projecting the future wellbeing of humans based on material and non-material factors.
Final results
An unexpected new hypothesis has been developed: that fish struggle to survive in large parts of the high seas due to insufficient dietary iron. The low iron supply has been well known for its relevance to phytoplankton and photosynthesis, but never previously linked to animal ecology. This work has major implications for marine ecology and food security. In addition, as an unexpected spin-off from considering the well-being of fishing populations, a new conceptual advance allowed the quantitative projection of future life satisfaction for all humans to the year 2050.
Website & more info
More info: https://earthsystemdynamics.org/iesd/bigsea/.