BOATSv2: new ecological and economic features improve simulations of high seas catch and effort

Abstract

Climate change and industrial fishing are having profound effects on marine ecosystems. Numerical models of fish communities and their interaction with fishing can help assess the biogeochemical and socioeconomic dynamics of this coupled human–natural system and how it is changing. However, existing models have significant biases and do not include many processes known to be relevant. Here we describe an updated version of the BiOeconomic mArine Trophic Size-spectrum (BOATS) model for global fish and fishery studies. The model incorporates new ecological and economic features designed to ameliorate prior biases. Recent improvements include reduction of fish growth rates in iron-limited high-nutrient low-chlorophyll regions and the ability to simulate fishery management. Features added to BOATS here for the first time include (1) a separation of pelagic and demersal fish communities to provide an expanded representation of ecological diversity and (2) spatial variation of fishing costs and catchability for more realistic fishing effort dynamics. We also introduce a new set of observational diagnostics designed to evaluate the model beyond the boundary of large marine ecosystems (66 commonly adopted coastal ocean ecoregions). Following a multi-step parameter selection procedure, the updated BOATSv2 model shows comparable performance to the original model in coastal ecosystems, accurately simulating catch, biomass, and fishing effort, and markedly improves the representation of fisheries in the high seas, correcting for excessive high seas and deep-sea catches in the previous version. Improvements mainly stem from separating pelagic and demersal energy pathways, complemented by spatially variable catchability of pelagic fish and depth- and distance-dependent fishing costs. The updated model code is available for simulating both historical and future scenarios.