1 The Scenario Barents Sea Study, a Case of Minimal Realistic Modelling to compare Management Strategies for Marine Ecosystems

• Main Author: Tore Schweder
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Barents Sea
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.482.6453; http://folk.uio.no/tores/Publications_files/Schweder_Boyd_et_al.pdf

Management of a marine ecosystem is regarded as a game played by the Government Agency against Nature. The quality of the management strategy is evaluated using models for the strategy taken by Nature. These models should be sufficiently realistic and also practical to implement and investigate on a computer. Whaling and sealing in the Barents Sea are of little economic interest of themselves, but might impact some other fisheries positively. Our model to evaluate strategies for whaling and sealing includes cod, herring, capelin, harp seals and minke whales, and emphasizes interactions between these populations caused by predation. For proposed management strategies, the stochastic system is repeatedly simulated over 100 years, and the strategies are evaluated by the resulting cod, capelin and herring TACs that are calculated from fixed rules. Our line of study was first pursued in the 1990s with an emphasis on management strategies for cod, herring and minke whales. It is now extended and refined with harp seals included, and with improved modelling of how predation mortality in the fish species is non-linearly linked to the abundances of all the modelled species.