The Center for Ocean has received a grant from the Danish Science Foundation to understand and describe the present and future state of fish and squid in the world’s oceans.
Global change is radically altering the conditions for life in the ocean. A concern is the future ocean food production capacity: how much protein can be produced? And which type of protein – small/large fish; pelagic/mesopelagic/demersal; fish/squid? The “Future Oceans” project aims to predict the changes in higher trophic level ocean life productivity and diversity globally under future change.
The project will combine novel size- and trait-based modelling techniques with classic functional-group food-web concepts to make a sufficiently lightweight yet robust model within the FEISTY framework (Petrik et al. 2019; van Denderen et al. 2021). Core foci are to resolve both shelf and open ocean ecosystems and to represent emerging resources, in particular squid. The model will be integrated into a standard Earth System Model of intermediate complexity and made available for general use. The project will apply the model to project future potential of capture fisheries and higher trophic level diversity for IPCC and IPBED projections.