Modelling Pelagic Ecosystems in the Sea

Attention is increasingly focusing on marine ecosystems due to stress from pollution, environmental perturbation such as climate change, and overfishing. Predicting possible changes in these ecosystems to, for example, changes in temperature or the physical circulation remains a high priority for the scientific community. Just as on land where there are tundras, temperate forests and tropical rain forests, marine ecosystems are various in kind, with for example different phytoplankton groups such as diatoms, coccolithophores and dinoflagellates having disparate distributions. The resulting responses of marine ecosystems to altered forcing are thus subtle, and by no means easy to predict. Developing ecosystem models to aid in understanding, and to make predictions of future states, remains a high priority for the scientific community. Perhaps surprisingly, however, few scientists have a formal training in modelling, and so up-to-date books on this subject are an important source of material and guidance.