Understanding and Predicting Marine Ecosystem Responses to Climate and Fishing

Marine ecosystems are dynamic and complex. Understanding the consequences of change from multiple human and environmental pressures can be challenging, but this knowledge is needed to assess the ecosystem effects of human activities. Many ecological indicators and models have been developed to address these goals and size-based food web models are emerging as a powerful approach due to their simplicity and well-established theory. I will give an overview of recent work showing how size-based food web models can be used to help us understand the structure of marine ecosystems, establish abundance baselines of marine communities and their responses to the potential effects climate and human activity. Looking across a range of applications from global to local scales, I will focus on how we can confront size-based models with data and the challenges that exist for their potential use to support ecosystem-based management.