Ecosystem futures - End-to-End modeling of the strait of Sicily ecosystem

The Strait of Sicily is one of the most important fishing areas of the Mediterranean Sea, where significant fleets operate with high fish production. It features high habitat heterogeneity, spawning and nursery grounds for large pelagic fish, persistent hotspots of diversity of demersal species, and large fluxes exotic species. Yet, the available knowledge on fishery resources and their ecosystems in the region is often scarce. The work done for the implementation of Atlantis for the Strait of Sicily represents the first ever attempt at: 1) systematically gathering data for the whole ecosystem (from bacteria to top predators and fishing fleets), 2) creating a E2E model for the Strait of Sicily as an Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management tool, 3) describing the impact of climatic changes and capture fisheries on the ecosystem. In this deliverable we describe the state of the art of the implementation of the End-2-End ecosystem model Atlantis (Fulton et al., 2004) for the Strait of Sicily. After a brief model description (section 1), the ecosystem characteristics of the study areas are reviewed (section 2), in order to substantiate the model implementation choices. A detailed description of the model parameterization is provided in section 3. The last section of the document (section 4) describes some results obtained by running two scenarios implemented for the Strait of Sicily case study: a hindcast run of the past 10 years describing the current state of the ecosystem and a future scenario based on the AR4 SRES scenario A2, corresponding to the ELME scenarios for National Enterprise.