SURIMI: Building Fisheries Management and Decision Making Tools on EDITO

EDITO Community Stories: Episode 1

Building fisheries management and decision-making tools on EDITO

In EDITO Community Stories, we explore the ecosystem of projects and initiatives enriching the EDITO platform. By onboarding their data, apps, models and other services on to the platform, they are helping to build the European Digital Twin Ocean, together.

LEARN MORE ABOUT SURIMI

Fishing activities provide food, employment and cultural heritage to millions. But they also exert pressure on marine ecosystems. Despite efforts to regulate activity, fishing stocks in Europe and across the world remain vulnerable.

One reason for this vulnerability is that policy often targets issues in isolation. For example, regulators set quotas for fishing specific species without estimating well how it will impact the marine ecosystem, livelihood of workers in the fishing sector, or the price of fish for consumers. To better understand and manage evolving interactions between human fishing activities and marine ecosystems, we need new tools to explore the full complexity of this relationship.

The EU-funded SURIMI project seeks to provide a multidimensional overview of this complex dynamic system. It aims to couple state-of-the-art computational models that reflect the complete fishery value chain – from marine ecology and fisher behavior to market value – and simulate how management strategies play out, highlighting important trade-offs.

“The way we run models is very special,” says Patrycja Antosz, Research director of CMSS Centre for Modeling Social Systems at NORCE and coordinator of the SURIMI project. Rather than a linear sequence in which one model concludes and provides input for another model to start running, the SURIMI models inform and learn from each other frequently. “It is not a chain of reporting but rather a well-planned conversation where models run in parallel and create a network of information exchanges.”

SURIMI model combinations will be made available to a wide range of stakeholders from science, industry, policy and society via the EDITO platform. “The EDITO team worked with us to develop a computational environment that supports executing the innovative communication protocols and provide necessary advice to decision-makers.” As a free, public infrastructure, EDITO will make it significantly easier for end users like business owners and policy makers to explore and interact with high-quality ocean data. Using SURIMI, for example, users will be able to test strategies and scenarios for managing the environmental, economic, and social aspects of fisheries.

BETTER MODELS FOR REAL-WORLD APPLICATIONS

By onboarding socio-ecological models of fisheries onto the EDITO platform, SURIMI aims to guide decision-making, problem-solving and policy creation in the real world.

“Currently, decision makers don’t have access to knowledge about all of the parts of complex adaptive systems,” notes Antosz. “Through EDITO and through SURIMI, they will be able to have state of the art knowledge at the palm of their hand, literally. This is a game changer for evidence-based decision making, because now you can test the effects of different what-if scenarios without bearing the costs of making mistakes.”

SURIMI’s models will allow different users to run what-if scenarios on EDITO to better understand and manage fisheries: from simulating the behavior of fishing fleets under different conditions, to testing the most effective way to balance resource management. In this way, SURIMI models bring knowledge to life, transforming repositories of information into interactive tools for decision-making.