Puneet Varma (Editor)

Ecopath

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Initial release
  
1992

Preview release
  
6.5 Beta / 16 May 2016

Written in
  
Visual Basic.NET, C#

Stable release
  
6.5 / 7 July 2016

Development status
  
Released, active

Ecopath

Developer(s)
  
Ecopath Research and Development Consortium

Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) is a free ecosystem modelling software suite, initially started at NOAA by Jeffrey Polovina, but has since primarily been developed at the UBC Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia. In 2007, it was named as one of the ten biggest scientific breakthroughs in NOAA’s 200-year history. The NOAA citation states that Ecopath “revolutionized scientists’ ability worldwide to understand complex marine ecosystems”. Behind this lie more than two decades of development work in association with Villy Christensen, Carl Walters, Daniel Pauly, and other fisheries scientists, followed with the provision of user support, training and co-development collaborations. Per January 2012 there are 6000+ registered users in 150+ countries.

Contents

Components

EwE has three main components:

  • Ecopath – a static, mass-balanced snapshot of the system
  • Ecosim – a time dynamic simulation module for policy exploration
  • Ecospace – a spatial and temporal dynamic module primarily designed for exploring impact and placement of protected areas.
  • Capabilities

    The Ecopath software package can be used to:

  • address ecological questions
  • evaluate ecosystem effects of fishing
  • explore management policy options
  • analyze impact and placement of marine protected areas
  • predict movement and accumulation of contaminants and tracers (Ecotracer)
  • model effect of environmental changes,
  • facilitate end-to-end ecosystem model construction
  • The desktop version of Ecopath with Ecosim runs only on Windows and requires Microsoft Access database drivers version 2007 or newer. The computational core of Ecopath with Ecosim can be executed on other operating systems such as Unix or Linux using the Mono common language runtime.

    Development Ecopath version 6 received support from the Lenfest Ocean Program and the Pew Charitable trusts. In 2011 the Ecopath Research and Development Consortium was founded to share the responsibility of maintaining and further developing the approach with institutions around the world.

    References

    Ecopath Wikipedia


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