A Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure for Convergence Science - Sustainable Fishery Management

Keywords: Climate Change, Fishery Management, Geographic Information Systems, Spatial Decision Making
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Greatly improved decision-making capabilities are critical to sustaining fisheries, and fisheries managers need to consider the interdependencies among fishery effort, changes in ocean physics and biogeochemistry, and decision-making to maximize the long-term benefit from marine resources under a rapidly changing climate. In addition, other human activities, such as offshore energy and aquaculture can impact fishing activity. Current decision support tools for fisheries management cannot: 1) accurately predict climate change impacts on fishery production because of large errors in most physical and biological models; 2) model spatial dependencies between climate, biogeochemistry, social engagement, and fishery effort; or 3) identify decision-making priorities that deal with conflicting management decisions.
Current climate models used by the IPCC to project future climate change impacts show severe systematic errors in major upwelling regions due to coarse model resolution (~1°). Increasing resolution to 0.1° greatly reduces errors relative to observations, leading to more realistic simulations. Such high-resolution models are thus more credible for prediction purposes but incur prohibitively high computational cost. As a result, only very few such simulations are currently available. We now have the ability to combine high-resolution Earth system models with ocean biogeochemistry and fisheries data to provide management support tools for the fishing industry. Our decision support system, Sustainable-Blue, will be translated from its present low-resolution to a high-resolution version, greatly increasing its use and forecasting ability.