Ecospace Output
Ecospace offers a number of facilities to write model outputs to storage for subsequent analysis.
Basic Ecospace Output
The most basic form of Ecospace output are spatially-temporally explicit distributions of biomass, fishing effort and catches in a range of file formats (Fig. 7). Ecospace can also write maps per time step, of computed habitat foraging capacity, contaminant concentrations, and discards, which can help to better understand the model’s behavior and address specific management questions. The EwE plug-in system (Steenbeek et al., 2016) allows the user to expand the list of standard outputs.
Be aware that writing output to hard-drive can amount to large volumes of data, especially when writing spatial output for every monthly time step.
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Regions and Transects
Ecospace can automatically summarize outputs over the whole model area by group and fleet. In addition, it is often useful to have information summarized by specific regions within the model area, for example when there are separate ecological regions or management units within the model domain (Fig. 8A). This is possible by loading a map with these sub-areas indicated in the ‘Maps’ interface in the specified ‘Regions’ location of the Ecospace interface. Note that a given cell can at most belong to one region. The program then summarizes the output by region as well.
Additionally, Ecospace can automatically extract information from a predefined transect. Transects are defined as input data on top of the Ecospace base map and after the runs are finished, values of the transects are extracted according to the depth, biomass, catch and MPAs intersected along the transect, per time step (Fig. 8B).
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- Figure 8 – A: The Mississippi River Delta Model partitioned in regions relevant to Louisiana coastal managers (reproduced from K. De Mutsert et al., 2016).
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- B: using the transect extraction tool to define transects for extracting time-varying Ecospace values (reproduced from the Transect plug-in user guide)
Datafiles and R/Py
Adaption
The chapter is in part adapted, with permission, from:
De Mutsert K, Marta Coll, Jeroen Steenbeek, Cameron Ainsworth, Joe Buszowski, David Chagaris, Villy Christensen, Sheila J.J. Heymans, Kristy A. Lewis, Simone Libralato, Greig Oldford, Chiara Piroddi, Giovanni Romagnoni, Natalia Serpetti, Michael Spence, Carl Walters. 2023. Advances in spatial-temporal coastal and marine ecosystem modeling using Ecopath with Ecosim and Ecospace. Treatise on Estuarine and Coastal Science, 2nd Edition. Elsevier.
