Using an Ecosystem Model to evaluate harvesting strategies and identify optimal use scenarios

Biodiversity and Ecology

UCL

UCL

Microsoft Research

Drew Purves

Growing economies and rising population drive worldwide demand for meat, timber and other natural resources. There is a concern that these dominate land-use and that other ecosystem services people rely on can be compromised. I propose to establish whether the search for sustainable solutions can be facilitated by applying a General Ecosystem Model (GEM). The Madingley Model is a new class of mechanistic models that is based on key ecological and biological principles and can be used to simulate the fate of all organisms, their interactions, how they may be impacted by climate and by anthropogenic activities. First, I implement the model and ground-truth it for its application to local harvesting and other ecosystem services. Next, I investigate the effects of different harvesting strategies and identify maximum sustainable yields, under different assumptions. By taking into consideration bioeconomic constraints such as market price for wild resources, I plan to make my management recommendations more realistic and therefore, more defensible. On a global scale, I will incorporate different land- and sea-use scenarios to suggest optimal resource use. This project is unique in that it uses a novel but potentially very powerful General Ecosystem Model to evaluate anthropogenic influences on multiple ecosystem services.

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