Líffræðifélag Íslands - biologia.is
Líffræðiráðstefnan 2023
Höfundar / Authors: Anika Sonjudóttir, Erla Sturludóttir, Bjarki Þór Elvarsson, Gunnar Stefánsson
Starfsvettvangur / Affiliations: Landbúnaðarháskólinn og Hafrannsóknastofnun
Kynnir / Presenter: Anika Sonjudóttir
Fisheries management in Iceland is mainly built on single species stock assessment models which aim to evaluate and predict future state of a particular stock at the time. However, fishing for one species may negatively impact other species and in recent years, the demand for ecosystem approaches to fisheries management has increased where species interaction or environment is considered. This research describes the development of Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) for Icelandic waters, but EwE is a widely used modelling approach that tracks trophic flows in the food web from plankton to top predators, such as marine mammals. The modelled area is the Icelandic EEZ or 751.345 km2. A total of 208 species inhabiting Icelandic waters were split into 37 functional groups: 20 fish groups, five groups of mammals, one seabird group, ten invertebrate groups, one primary producer and one detritus group. Further, cod, haddock and saithe were split into stanza (Juveniles and adults) to provide insight in stock-recruitment relationships. The balanced Ecopath model describes the food web interactions between groups and Ecosim shows the simulated interactions between different species/groups in the ecosystem over time.