The Chatham Rise is a highly productive deep-sea ecosystem that supports numerous substantial commercial fisheries, and is a likely candidate for an ecosystem based approach to fisheries management in New Zealand. We present the first end-to-end ecosystem model of the Chatham Rise, which is also to the best of our knowledge, the first end-to-end ecosystem model of any deep-sea ecosystem. We describe the process of data compilation through to model validation and analyse the importance of knowledge gaps with respect to model dynamics and results. The model produces very similar results to fisheries stock assessment models for key fisheries species, and the population dynamics and system interactions are realistic. Confidence intervals based on bootstrapping oceanographic variables are produced. The model components that have knowledge gaps and are most likely to influence model results were oceanographic variables, and the aggregate species groups ‘seabird’ and ‘cetacean other’. We recommend applications of the model, such as forecasting biomasses under various fishing regimes, include alternatives that vary these components.
History
Publication title
PeerJ
Volume
7
Article number
e6517
Number
e6517
Pagination
1-41
ISSN
2167-8359
Department/School
Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies
Publisher
PeerJ, Ltd.
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Rights statement
Copyright 2019 McGregor et al. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/