Making Ecosystem Modeling Operational–A Novel Distributed Execution Framework to Systematically Explore Ecological Responses to Divergent Climate Trajectories

Abstract

Abstract Marine Ecosystem Models (MEMs) are increasingly driven by Earth System Models (ESMs) to better understand marine ecosystem dynamics, and to analyze the effects of alternative management efforts for marine ecosystems under potential scenarios of climate change. However, policy and commercial activities typically occur on seasonal‐to‐decadal time scales, a time span widely used in the global climate modeling community but where the skill level assessments of MEMs are in their infancy. This is mostly due to technical hurdles that prevent the global MEM community from performing large ensemble simulations with which to undergo systematic skill assessments. Here, we developed a novel distributed execution framework constructed of low‐tech and freely available technologies to enable the systematic execution and analysis of linked ESM/MEM prediction ensembles. We apply this framework on the seasonal‐to‐decadal time scale, and assess how retrospective forecast uncertainty in an ensemble of initialized decadal ESM predictions affects a mechanistic and spatiotemporal explicit global trophodynamic MEM. Our results indicate that ESM internal variability has a relatively low impact on the MEM variability in comparison to the broad assumptions related to reconstructed fisheries. We also observe that the results are also sensitive to the ESM specificities. Our case study warrants further systematic explorations to disentangle the impacts of climate change, fisheries scenarios, MEM internal ecological hypotheses, and ESM variability. Most importantly, our case study demonstrates that a simple and free distributed execution framework has the potential to empower any modeling group with the fundamental capabilities to operationalize marine ecosystem modeling.

Keywords

• marine ecosystem models
• systematic assessments
• distributed execution
• open‐source software
• MacGyver