Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) is a free and

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

ecosystem model An ecosystem model is an abstract, usually mathematical, representation of an ecological system (ranging in scale from an individual population, to an ecological community, or even an entire biome), which is studied to better understand the r ...

ling

software suite A software suite (also known as an application suite) is a collection of computer programs (application software, or programming software) of related functionality, sharing a similar user interface and the ability to easily exchange data with eac ...

, initially started at

NOAA The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA ) is an American scientific and regulatory agency charged with forecasting weather, monitoring oceanic and atmospheric conditions, charting the seas, conducting deep-sea exploratio ...

Jeffrey Polovina Jeffrey Polovina is an American marine scientist. He is known for creating the marine ecosystem model Ecopath. Early life Jeffrey Joseph Polovina was born on September 30, 1948, in Troy, New York. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with ...

, but has since primarily been developed at the formerly

UBC Fisheries Centre The UBC Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (IOF) is a research unit at the University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Public university, public research university with campuses near University of British ...

of the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Public university, public research university with campuses near University of British Columbia Vancouver, Vancouver and University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada ...

. In 2007, it was named as one of the ten biggest scientific breakthroughs in NOAA's 200-year history. The NOAA citation states that Ecopath "revolutionized scientists' ability worldwide to understand complex marine ecosystems". Behind this lie more than three decades of development work in association with a thriving network of

fisheries scientist Fisheries science is the academic discipline of managing and understanding fisheries. It is a multidisciplinary science, which draws on the disciplines of limnology, oceanography, freshwater biology, marine biology, meteorology, conservation, ...

s such as

Villy Christensen Villy Christensen is an ecosystem modeller with a background in fisheries science. He is known for his work as a project leader and core developer of Ecopath, an ecosystem modelling software system widely used in fisheries management. Ecopath was ...

Carl Walters Carl Walters (born 1944) is an American-born Canadian biologist known for his work involving fisheries stock assessments, the adaptive management concept, and ecosystem modeling. Walters has been a professor of Zoology and Fisheries at the Univer ...

and

Daniel Pauly Dr. Sir Daniel Pauly is a France, French-born marine biologist, well known for his work in studying human impacts on global fisheries and in 2020 was the most cited fisheries scientist in the world. He is a professor and the project leader of the ...

, and software engineers around the world. EwE is funded through projects, user contributions, user support, training courses and co-development collaborations. Per November 2021 there are an estimated 8000+ users across

academia An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of tertiary education. The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, founded approximately 386 BC at Akademia, a sanctuary of Athena, the go ...

non-government organizations A non-governmental organization (NGO) is an independent, typically nonprofit organization that operates outside government control, though it may get a significant percentage of its funding from government or corporate sources. NGOs often focus ...

industry Industry may refer to: Economics * Industry (economics), a generally categorized branch of economic activity * Industry (manufacturing), a specific branch of economic activity, typically in factories with machinery * The wider industrial sector ...

and

government A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a State (polity), state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive (government), execu ...

s in 150+ countries.

Components

EwE has three main components: * Ecopath – a static, mass-balanced snapshot of the system * Ecosim – a time dynamic simulation module for policy exploration * Ecospace – a spatial and temporal dynamic module designed for exploring the combined impacts of fishing, the placement of protected areas, and changing environmental conditions.

Capabilities

The Ecopath software package can be used to: * address

ecological Ecology () is the natural science of the relationships among living organisms and their environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere levels. Ecology overlaps with the closely re ...

questions * evaluate ecosystem effects of fishing * explore management policy options * analyze impact and placement of

marine protected area A marine protected area (MPA) is a protected area of the world's seas, oceans, estuaries or in the US, the Great Lakes. These marine areas can come in many forms ranging from wildlife refuges to research facilities. MPAs restrict human activity ...

s * predict movement and accumulation of

contaminants Contamination is the presence of a constituent, impurity, or some other undesirable element that renders something unsuitable, unfit or harmful for the physical body, natural environment, workplace, etc. Types of contamination Within the scie ...

and tracers (Ecotracer) * model effect of environmental changes, * facilitate end-to-end ecosystem model construction Development Ecopath version 6.0 received support from th
Lenfest Ocean Program
and

the Pew Charitable trusts The Pew Charitable Trusts is an independent non-profit, non-governmental organization (NGO), founded in 1948. Pew's stated mission is to serve the public interest by "improving public policy, informing the public, and invigorating civic life". ...

. In 2011 th
Ecopath Research and Development Consortium
was founded to share the responsibility of maintaining and further developing the approach with institutions around the world. EwE exclusively relies on user involvement for continued software development and releases of new versions. The desktop version of Ecopath with Ecosim runs only on

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

and requires Microsoft Access database drivers version 2007 or newer. The computational core of Ecopath with Ecosim can be executed on other operating systems such as

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

using the Mono common language runtime. Spin-off versions in R, Matlab and Fortran are developed independently of the main desktop version of EwE, and are not supported by the Ecopath Research and Development Consortium.

Funding

In 2013, development efforts were centralized under Ecopath International Initiative, Spain, which coincided with a switch to a community-driven development model overseen by the Ecopath Research and Development Consortium. As the approach does not receive any core funding, the Ecopath with Ecosim approach now relies entirely on user-contributed project funding for continued development and releases.

References

External links

Official siteSocial network siteRepository of published EwE models
{{Use dmy dates, date=February 2019 Environmental science software Conceptual modelling Fisheries science Computing by computer model