Development of a Climate-to-Fish-to-Fishers Model: Proof-of-Principle and Exploratory Simulations Using Anchovies and Sardines in the California Current

Fisheries managers are increasingly being asked to quantify fishing effects at the ecosystem level and to project fishing effects under future, previously unobserved, conditions such as climate change. This not only requires models but requires models that represent the physics, lower trophic level, fish food web, and fishing in sufficient detail to allow for fishing to respond to changing conditions and to account for both direct and indirect effects of fishing.  We present our progress to date on the development of an end-to-end modeling framework within the widely-used ROMS (Regional Ocean Modeling System) circulation model. The NEMURO Nutrient-Phytoplankton-Zooplankton (NPZ) submodel provides the lower trophic level dynamics, a multi-species, individual-based, full life cycle submodel simulates fish population and community dynamics, and an agent-based fishing fleet submodel allows for dynamic representation of harvest.  We describe our preliminary version of the modeling framework, which focuses on anchovies and sardines in the California Current system.  We demonstrate how the various submodels can be solved simultaneously for a multi-decadal historical simulation (1958-2006) and present the results of several scenarios. We need to be pushing the limits of modeling and data now to be ready for fisheries management challenges that we will face 10 years from now.