Making spatial-temporal marine ecosystem modelling better - A perspective

Abstract

11 pages, 7 figures ; Marine Ecosystem Models (MEMs) provide a deeper understanding of marine ecosystem dynamics. The United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development has highlighted the need to deploy these complex mechanistic spatial-temporal models to engage policy makers and society into dialogues towards sustainably managed oceans. From our shared perspective, MEMs remain underutilized because they still lack formal validation, calibration, and uncertainty quantifications that undermines their credibility and uptake in policy arenas. We explore why these shortcomings exist and how to enable the global modelling community to increase MEMs' usefulness. We identify a clear gap between proposed solutions to assess model skills, uncertainty, and confidence and their actual systematic deployment. We attribute this gap to an underlying factor that the ecosystem modelling literature largely ignores: technical issues. We conclude by proposing a conceptual solution that is cost-effective, scalable and simple, because complex spatial-temporal marine ecosystem modelling is already complicated enough ; MC and JS acknowledge funding from the EuroMarine 2018 call for Foresight Workshops and Working Groups proposals. JS, MC and MGP acknowledge the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation grant agreement N° PID2020-118097RB-I00 (ProOceans). JS, MC and YJS acknowledge the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements N° 869300 (FutureMARES) and N° 817578 (TRIATLAS). ADM acknowledges the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements N° 869300 (FutureMARES). MC acknowledges the 'Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence' accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S) to the Institute of Marine Science. GR acknowledges the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, Humboldt Tipping project 01LC1823D). VC acknowledges support through NSERC Discovery Grant RGPIN-2019-04901. VC and GO acknowledge funding through the NSERC Mitacs Accelerate Fellowship (IT09266), IOF Ocean Leaders Fellowship, and DFO. YJS acknowledges funding support from the Biodiversa and Belmont Forum project SOMBEE (BiodivScen ERA-Net COFUND programme, ANR contract n°ANR-18-EBI4-0003-01), and the Pew marine fellows programme ; Peer reviewed