Week 3: Use mizer models

Now that you have built and examined your model at steady state, we will use it to explore changing conditions and temporal dynamics.

Lecture

This week’s contributor is Julia Blanchard. Her lecture provides a broad overview of the different ways in which mizer is being used to help understand the consequences of change in aquatic ecosystems. There are a lot of ways! The material describes how you can set model simulations to study change, some of which are explored in this week’s tutorials.

Tutorials

Using examples, the tutorials are designed to help you develop your own model simulation experiments:

  1. Tune the resilience to fishing First, we will explore how sensitive your model is to the effects of fishing. We will show how the reproduction levels influence the resilience of the species. We make adjustments to the reproduction levels to produce realistic responses to fishing intensity.

  2. Simulate fishing scenarios
    Once the resilience to fishing is tuned, we can assess how the model responds to changes in fishing through time. This step involves looking closer at the fishing parameters in mizer and setting up different fishing scenarios.

  3. Change resources
    Next we will look at the resource spectrum and how changes in three main resource parameters can affect our ecosystem. We will also show an example of how to use external data on resource time series to force the mizer model.

  4. Explore further scenarios
    This tutorial provides extra material, prepared by Julia Blanchard using another system (Patagonian toothfish fishery) as an example. Here you can learn on how to set time series of fishing changes and more.

This week you can continue to work in the worksheet repository you created last week at https://classroom.github.com/a/gS1LgX3B