BIGSEA
(BIoGeochemistry and ecosystem interactions with Socio-Economic Activity in the global ocean)
The overarching goal of the BIGSEA Project is to develop new quantitative methods for including human activity as a directly-coupled component of Earth system models. The global ocean is an ideal testbed for this approach, given the relatively simple nature of human activity in the ocean, and rapid developments in simulating the marine ecosystem from ocean physics.
The BIGSEA Project is developing a unified, data-constrained, grid-based modeling framework to represent the most important interactions of the global human-ocean system. The work is exploring new ways to represent human activity, well-being, and societal behaviour within a physically-based structure.
By considering the human-ocean system from this vantage point, some key questions emerge. These include:
- How can human experience, quantified on an individual, per-hour basis, be related to fishing activity in a simple, data-constrained way?
- How do animals influence the sinking flux of organic particles, and what does this mean for oxygen minimum zones, nutrient recycling and nutrient stoichiometry?
- Has ocean biogeochemistry been altered by the restructuring of marine ecosystems caused by fishing?
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 682602).