ECOPATH 25 YEARS CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS:  EXTENDED ABSTRACTS

Fisheries Centre Research Reports 17(3) 2009

Edited by:  M.L. Deng Palomares, Lyne Morissette, Andres Cisneros-Montemayor,

Divya Varkey, Marta Coll, Chiara Piroddi

Download this report: Full Report

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD

I wish to congratulate the organizers of this conference, as it celebrates a momentous event in the history of fisheries science: the emergence of a simple way of representing a marine ecosystem. Many approaches had been developed at the time Ecopath emerged to represent and simulate the interrelationships of prey, predators and fisheries in marine ecosystems, and many have been published since. But none had the simplicity of the approach that Jeffrey Polovina proposed and none of them used data that fisheries and marine scientists readily had available on their desks the way Ecopath does.

The first of the abstracts in this report, by Jeff, outlines how Ecopath came to be in Hawaii. The second, by Daniel Pauly, outlines how the ‘franchise’ for this approach and software then went from Hawaiii to Manila, where he and Villy Christensen further developed the software and assisted in its dissemination. Interestingly, it was in developing countries where, at first, it was most readily picked-up.

When Daniel and Villy moved to the Fisheries Centre, in the mid 1990s, the ‘franchise’ moved with them and Carl Walters, by developing Ecosim in Ecopath, put the finishing touch on the Ecopath approach, which was then eagerly adopted by researchers in the Fisheries Centre, and gradually, by a wider circle of colleagues in North America, Europe and elsewhere, even reaching the borders of my discipline, Economics.

Ecopath, now 25 years old, really has come of age, to the extent that it was named recently by NOAA as one of the 10 major scientific breakthroughs in the organization’s 200-year history. It is fitting that the Fisheries Centre should host this meeting, both because of its members’ role in the development of Ecopath and because it continues to serve as a hub for its further development.

RASHID SUMAILA, DIRECTOR

UBC FISHERIES CENTRE