Plenty more fish in the sea?

Back to index page

Next article: News in brief

Once thought to be an endless source of bounty, rampant over-fishing around the globe has caused world fish stocks to plummet, with some of our favourite species hovering near collapse. The effects of over-fishing are being exacerbated by global climate change, which changes the distribution of species and the location of biodiversity hotspots. Under these conditions, good fisheries management is crucial. But how can stocks be controlled if we don’t know their location and numbers? A new grid-based tool, AquaMaps, looks like it could provide the answer.

‘In fisheries, we have problems when we try to do spatial analysis with data,’ says Anton Ellenbroek of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, because ‘there are no clear boundaries in the ocean.’ The nature of the data compounds the problem. Large-scale, marine data sets frequently come with built-in biases, they tend to concentrate in certain areas, such as along the continental shelf, and some data is over a century old (a time period over which many species will have been taxonomically reshuffled). AquaMaps addresses the difficulties of modelling the global distribution of marine species.

Since 2004, AquaMaps has been developed by a collaboration of biologists and modellers from academic and international NGOs. It gives the likelihood of finding a certain species in an area. Relatively speaking, the resolution is high: each pixel represents an area of just 55 by 55 kilometres. The novelty and inherent strength of AquaMaps, is the combination of survey data (where a species has been found) with environmental data and habitat profiles (where a species should be found).

Generating a map is a computationally intense task: drawing one multi-species map requires 125 million computations. To help manage and process their data, the AquaMaps consortium has recently teamed up with D4Science who will provide a virtual research environment that will use the computing infrastructure of the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project. The first phase of this work, which was presented at the EGEE User Forum this March, was the creation of a broad basis of maps, charting the distribution of marine species, families, orders, classes and phyla. The improvement is significant: where a query used to take three days to be returned, a map is now available within seconds. ‘This will make our reporting much easier,’ says Ellenbroek.

‘The crux of the issue for AquaMaps’, says Pedro Andrade, a software engineer working with D4Science and EGEE, ‘is that their data requirements limit their capabilities. Currently they can search distribution maps for about 3,500 species. With enough support, this could go up to 50,000. We can give them a distributed-computing environment which could drastically reduce the time needed for searching and processing.’ AquaMaps also needs to manage constantly evolving data that is located around the world. Northern bluefin tuna might be found to prefer a slightly different surface temperature, or a new survey of the ocean floor might change elevation profiles. AquaMaps needs to combine this new data with data that is stored in institutions around the world. The Grid is the perfect solution, as Pedro Andrade describes ‘A grid-computing environment, which easily allows for data stored at one outpost to be accessed and used within an entire organisation, fits [AquaMaps’] information requirements very well’.

The next phase of AquaMaps will see users creating their own maps according to their desired specifications. This should help fisheries’ managers discover which areas and resources are most threatened and – as climate change is sure to affect species distribution – plan for expected changes as our planet warms.

www.eu-egee.org

www.d4science.eu

www.aquamaps.org