Location: Rhode Island

Collaborators: Jeremy Collie, Candace Oviatt, Emi Uchida, Tracey Dalton (URI); Conor McManus, Jason McNamee (RI Dept of Environmental Management)

Lab Personnel: Annie Innes-Gold

Goal: Develop an ecosystem model of Narragansett Bay that integrates food web processes with biogeochemical and circulation models, as well as human behavior.

Significance: This research will allow us to better understand impacts of anthropogenic stressors by utilizing end-to-end models, thus enabling ecosystem-based management.

Background: The need to balance ecological and human wellbeing in the face of global climate change and fisheries has compelled scientists to work across the natural, physical, and social sciences. Interdisciplinary collaboration is also considered to be essential to the implementation of ecosystem-based management. Ecosystem modeling is a powerful tool for understanding how multiple components interact, feedback to one another, and impact social-ecological trade-offs. Our work will focus on fish and people, coupling a food web model that includes fisheries species of socioeconomic and ecological importance with an agent-based model of fisher behavior. Utilizing the wide array of long-term datasets from Narragansett Bay will enable us to build a data-driven model and evaluate uncertainty and parameter sensitivity.

Funding: US National Science Foundation (NSF)