Statement of Purpose

Snippet

Amalgamated Fisheries Modeling: A cross-scale approach to environmental dilemmas

This project aims to better understand systemic environmental problems, focused on fisheries management, by developing new cross-scale perspectives. Researchers will investigate how social and ecological systems at diverse scales interact, and how these insights can be integrated into a general modeling framework for coupled multi-scale dynamics.

Longer Statement

The Open World project aims to better understand systemic problems in social-ecological systems by developing new multi-scale perspectives. As an application and context, we focus on fisheries management. Fisheries collapse is a global concern, affecting world food supply and economic prospects for fishing communities, and impacting marine environments and endangered species. Policies structures have struggled to manage the perverse economic incentives, multiple scales of uncertainty, and unintended feedbacks in this highly variable and spatially complex system. Policies and dynamics at regional scales, including the influence of climate, trade, and migration networks, have a complicated relationship with local choices and behaviors. By improving our understand of how scales and systems interact, we hope to reveal opportunities for more sustainable management.

To study these interactions, the Open World project explores a powerful intersection between new theoretical and technological grounds. Theoretically, we seek a stronger foundation for multi-scale systems and new forms of coupling. This foundation supports the development of new frameworks for "amalgamated" modeling, allowing models at diverse scales and contexts to interact. However, such a composite model necessitates new theoretical and technological work to elucidate the critical principles behind the resulting dynamics.

Models are most effective at a given scale and context, but the boundaries between social institutions, between ecosystems, and between scales are rarely clear. Naive coupling of these models can both distort their accuracy and obfuscate the drivers behind their results.

Models at different scales are effective... Global and regional models can

global to local risk drivers and solutions, and local to global feedbacks through aggregation

The

This project investigates how we can move beyond coupling scale, overlap plug-in

The project focuses on interactions between scales and uncovering the critical principles behind the resulting dynamics. To do so, we investigate new forms of coupling,

To support this, the project will build a general framework for integrating an unlimited collection of models of social-ecological systems. This framework would interface between overlapping models at different scales and contexts and operating according to different techniques and assumptions. The composite system will be transparent in its operation, available as a rich foundation for other researchers, and open to new contributions.

Along with new archetypes that move beyond coupling, the framework will provide computational tools for more insightful communication.

A modeling framework which provides both more comprehensive

plug-inable

multi-scale

cross-scale perspective new tools in modeling

intersection of

new approaches to ...

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• Modeling Framework to understand general stuff
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