What has been lacking, until recently, is a successful method to develop, implement and sustain informatics solutions to modern application problems, such as environmental and climate assessments, that provide interoperability among very diverse and heterogeneous data and information sources, as well as multi- disciplinary organizations and people. This approach is directed toward an integrated ecosystem assessment for marine fisheries.

The objective is to enable routine, integrated ecosystem assessments and forecasts including impacts related to climate change and the capacity to address vulnerability, risks, and resiliency, and to develop an outcome based process that results in informed tradeoffs and priority setting. The goal is to bring ocean informatics to the forefront as an essential tool for implementing this new national policy framework and advancing the capacity for science in support of ecosystem based management, large marine ecosystems, as well as integrated ecosystem assessments.

Existing data will be leveraged via semantic web technologies to capture knowledge. These technologies can leverage extant vocabularies and data repositories used by the stakeholders and define the meaning of that data by providing language constructs understood by computers that closely reflect how people think and pose questions of the data.

Central to the success of this initiative is the commitment to train a new generation of scientists who will learn to interact effectively with this new integrated and interoperable ecosystem assessment capability.

Use Case Goal - Efficient generation of figures and tables representing ecosystem data and information products for the bi-annual (or annual) Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) Ecosystem Status Report (ESR).

Summary - The ESR addresses the Driver-Pressure-State portion of the greater Integrated Ecosystem Assessment (IEA) Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (D, P, S, I, R) framework and presents the ecosystem status based on data and information products representing climate forcing (D), physical pressures (P), primary and secondary production (S), benthos (S), upper trophic levels (S), anthropogenic factors (D, S), and integrated ecosystem measures (S). Data and information products include indicators, time series, geographic maps, (in the future, thematic maps), and uni-variate and multi-variate analyses. Data and information products are derived for the NEUSCS (Northeast United State Continental Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem as a whole and ecological production units, e.g. eco-region. At present the scale hierarchy for these units are simple but must accommodate future spatially explicit/ contained definitions.

The Integrated Ecosystems Assessment Initiative – Enabling the AssessmentOf Impacts on Large Marine Ecosystems: Informatics to the Forefront of Science Based Decision Support

Peter Fox1,2, Andrew Maffei2, Massimo DiStefano1, Suzanne Lawrence3, Cyndy Chandler2

1Tetherless World Constellation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY, 2Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. 3Suzanne Lawrence, Inc.Background and Example Use Case IEA Processes and Vocabularies Relationships Between Stakeholders

Large Marine Ecosystems

Contact: pfox@cs.rpi.edu, amaffei@whoi.edu, suzanne@suzannelawrence.net, cchandler@whoi.edu

Iterative Design and Development

Use Case Activity Diagram for ESRGeneric Interoperability Approach Proposed National Ocean Policy Designates 9 Large Marine Ecosystems

within US to serve as unifying framework for integrated science, management, and governance

(Graphic provided with permission of Suzanne Lawrence)

Sponsor: NSF/OCI/INTEROP – OCI-0955649. Agency partners: NOAA Marine Fisheries Service. NGO Partners: TNC, PSP