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 the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
ecosystem modelling 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 each ...
, initially started at
NOAA
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (abbreviated as NOAA ) is an United States scientific and regulatory agency within the United States Department of Commerce that forecasts weather, monitors oceanic and atmospheric conditio ...
by
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 (UBC) that was formed in 2015 by incorporating members from the former UBC Fisheries Centre
The UBC Institute for the Oceans and Fisher ...
of the
University of British Columbia
The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public university, public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks a ...
. 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 Unive ...
and
Daniel Pauly
Daniel Pauly is a 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 Sea Around Us ...
, 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 secondary education, secondary or tertiary education, tertiary higher education, higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membershi ...
,
non-government organizations
A non-governmental organization (NGO) or non-governmental organisation (see spelling differences) is an organization that generally is formed independent from government. They are typically nonprofit entities, and many of them are active in h ...
,
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
governments
A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state.
In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is a ...
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 study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overlaps wi ...
questions
* evaluate
ecosystem effects of fishing
* explore
management policy options
* analyze impact and placement of
marine protected area
Marine protected areas (MPA) are protected areas of 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 for a conserv ...
s
* predict movement and accumulation of
contaminants
Contamination is the presence of a constituent, impurity, or some other undesirable element that spoils, corrupts, infects, makes unfit, or makes inferior a material, physical body, natural environment, workplace, etc.
Types of contamination
Wi ...
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 Programand
the Pew Charitable trusts
The Pew Charitable Trusts is an independent non-profit, non-governmental organization (NGO), founded in 1948.
With over 6 billion in assets, its stated mission is to serve the public interest by "improving public policy, informing the public, a ...
. In 2011 th
Ecopath Research and Development Consortiumwas 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 group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
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, multiuser 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, and ot ...
or
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
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