Project: CAMEO: Building the Foundation: An End-to-End Modeling Workshop

Project Summary

The goal of the proposed activity is to produce a coherent description of the methods available for end-to-end modeling; analyze the range of outputs, and of their limitations; and assess their use as decision support tools for future resource management. Toward these ends, it is proposed to organize and hold an open 3.5-day Workshop on the theme of analytical evaluation of end-to-end marine food web models, and to produce a refereed journal volume of the results. The Workshop is to be held in the fall/winter of 2009/2010 at Woods Hole, MA. It is anticipated that scientists from both academia and government laboratories will participate. The proposed activity will address three themes designed to advance the general field of marine ecosystem modeling and end-to-end food web modeling in particular. These themes are: (1) Review of existing end-to end methods and their underlying rationales; (2) Skill assessment of existing end-to-end models; and (3) Application to management and decision-making.

The workshop will be organized and managed by a Steering Committee consisting of the four principal investigators plus two external members. Applications to participate in the workshop will be solicited broadly and accepted from all interested parties, but the number of attendees will be limited to a maximum of 40. Participants will be selected on the basis of their expertise and potential to contribute to the goals of the Workshop. Early-career scientists and postdoctoral investigators will be encouraged to attend. Lead speakers and discussion leaders for each workshop theme will invited, as will a plenary speaker. Papers presented at the Workshop, and generated by break-out groups, will be published as a group in a special issue of a refereed journal, to be edited by the project's Steering Committee.

The proposed activity responds directly to the following objective of the U.S. Ocean Research Priorities Plan: "Development of strategies and methodologies for comparative analyses, including modeling frameworks that can be applied consistently across ecosystems, and that facilitate design of decision support tools. This might be accomplished through individual research projects and/or workshops". The proposed activity is alsoconsistent with CAMEO's initial goal to build the foundation for future CAMEOresearch by supporting the development of research tools and strategic approaches.